Recent interdisciplinary materials chemistry research efforts in the ZAP lab titled “Catalyst Halogenation Enables Rapid and Efficient Polymerizations with Visible to Far-Red Light” has been published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. In this paper, Page and coworkers developed highly reactive visible to far-red light driven catalysts to convert liquid resins into solid plastics in just seconds! Characterization revealed that adding elements with large atomic number to the catalysts facilitated the unprecedented reactivity. Moreover, light intensities smaller than that emitted from a cell phone screen proved effective to harden liquid resins in under one minute. As a demonstration of utility, the catalysts were employed in high resolution 3D printing using a green light projector (ex/ Hook ‘em image shown to the right). This work was led by graduate student Alex Stafford and includes collaborations with Prof. Sean Roberts (UT Chemistry) and Prof. Shane Yost (Texas State). Future research includes pushing catalyst absorption into the near infrared (>780 nm) to enable emerging technologies in mild and low energy 3D printing of biological scaffolds for tissue engineering and strong and lightweight composites for aerospace applications.
