Multimaterials 3D Printing for Free Assembly Manufacturing of Magnetic Driving Soft Actuator

Magnetic Fe3O4 nanoparticles are employed to develop digital light processing 3D printing resin, which is used to fabricate arbitrary-shape soft actuators with multimaterials printing in a free assembly manner. Various mechanical properties and printed morphology of curing resin with different Fe3O4 nanoparticles content are explored to demonstrate the feasibility and precision. By using magnetic and nonmagnetic resins as the magnetic and nonmagnetic segments, mulitple magnetic devices and actuators are prepared by digital light processing (DLP) 3D printing technology. Moreover, the interfacial binding strength between magnetic and nonmagnetic segments and deflection with different diameters of printed lattices and content of Fe3O4 nanoparticles are investigated. DLP 3D printing enables the free assembly manufacturing of actuators with complicated architectures to achieve bending, deformation, cargo transportation, and so on. As proof-of-concept, a flexible gripper is printed through integrating magnetic responsive and nonresponsive materials into one body. This approach with special material will be promising to extend the capability of 3D printing for applications in controllable delivery with remote magnetic control in biological, medical, and robotic fields.