Additive Manufacturing of Functional Microarchitected Reactors for Energy, Environmental, and Biological Applications

Abstract

The use of microreactors in the continuous fluidic system has been rapidly expanded over the past three decades. Developments in materials science and engineering have accelerated the advancement of the microreactor technology, enabling it to play a critical role in chemical, biological, and energy applications. The emerging paradigm of digital additive manufacturing broadens the range of the material flexibility, innovative structural design, and new functionality of the conventional microreactor system. The control of spatial arrangements with functional printable materials determines the mass transport and energy transfer within architected microreactors, which are significant for many emerging applications, including use in catalytic, biological, battery, or photochemical reactors. However, challenges such as lack of design based on multiphysics modeling and material validation are currently preventing the broader applications and impacts of functional microreactors conjugated with digital manufacturing beyond the laboratory scale. This review covers a state-of-the-art of research in the development of some of the most advanced digital manufactured functional microreactors. We then the outline major challenges in the field and provide our perspectives on future research and development directions.