Fabrication of Multi-Material Pneumatic Actuators and Microactuators Using Stereolithography

Pneumatic actuators are of great interest for device miniaturization, microactuators, soft robots, biomedical engineering, and complex control systems. Recently, multi-material actuators have become of high interest to researchers due to their comprehensive range of suitable applications. Three-dimensional (3D) printing of multi-material pneumatic actuators would be the ideal way to fabricate customized actuators, but so far, this is mostly limited to deposition-based methodologies, such as fused deposition modeling (FDM) or Polyjetting. Vat-based stereolithography is one of the most relevant high-resolution 3D printing methods but is only rarely utilized in the multi-material 3D printing of materials. This study demonstrated multi-material stereolithography using combinations of materials with different Young's moduli, i.e., 0.5 MPa and 1.1 GPa, for manufacturing pneumatic actuators and microactuators with a resolution as small as 200 mu m. These multi-material actuators have advantages over single-material actuators in terms of their deformation controllability and ease of assembly.

Automated summary

Pneumatic actuators are widely applied in device miniaturization, microactuators, soft robots, biomedical engineering, and complex control systems. The recent interest in multi-material actuators stems from their versatile applications. However, the fabrication of customized actuators using multi-material pneumatic actuators is mostly limited to deposition-based methodologies. This study demonstrates the use of vat-based stereolithography for multi-material 3D printing of pneumatic actuators with high resolution and deformable controllability.