State of the art of carbon 3D printing
Résumé
As an insoluble, infusible and non-weldable material, carbon is a priori unsuitable for 3D printing. However, in recent years, spectacular progress has been made in the additive manufacturing of carbon, which has gradually been able to embrace a growing number of processing technologies.
This presentation aims to present an up-to-date state of the art of 3D printing techniques applied to carbon materials. If the use of carbon as a filler in 3D-printed polymers is not new, and some useful reminders will be made on this subject, this presentation will mainly deal with the preparation of pure carbon materials through modern additive manufacturing methods. It will be clearly shown that, depending on the techniques implemented, the number of steps, the physical and textural properties, but also the final dimensions of the object thus produced and the resolution of its geometrical details can be extremely different. Consequently, the applications of these new materials will also be very varied, and most often one technique will not be able to replace another according to the intended purpose.
The advantages and shortcomings of the different techniques of additive manufacturing of pure carbon components will be presented, and examples of recent achievements will be given, demonstrating the full potential of carbon 3D printing, which still has much room for development.