| Abstract Scope |
The advancement of additive manufacturing (AM) or 3D printing has shown extraordinary potential to revolutionize many fields, including glass science. We present the development and characterization of sol-gel-derived hybrid colloidal feedstocks designed for fabricating glass by direct ink write (DIW) AM. Our research mainly focuses on binary silica-based feedstocks targeting specific optical properties, including improved optical transmission, tunable refractive indices, and color filtering. We report multiple sol-gel approaches for synthesizing hybrid colloids of various morphologies and compositions and confirm their physical and chemical structural properties by electron and atomic force microscopies and Raman and FTIR spectroscopies, respectively. We also investigate how colloidal feedstock structure influences glass network formation upon thermal processing and densification using those same techniques. Ongoing research seeks to compare the resulting glass structures fabricated from sintered sol-gel colloidal feedstocks with melt-quench controls. |