Additive Manufacturing combined with Colloidal Assembly

Additive Manufacturing has emerged as a transformative technology, attracting increased attention across diverse industrial sectors. Its use has expanded beyond prototyping to the manufacturing of final products, including launch vehicles for commercial orbital launch services or customized implants in medical technology. However, the dichotomy of producing either macroscale structures with low printing resolution or creating high-resolution but microscale components has limited the full potential of AM. In this dissertation, a novel strategy is proposed to address this challenge by combining AM (as a top-down approach) with colloidal assembly (as a bottom-up approach). This unique hybrid AM process is used to fabricate colloid-based structures, including photonic structures for heat-management strategies, structural colors, and bio-inspired shape-morphing ceramic polymeric composites. The innovative integration of AM and colloidal assembly presented in this work disrupts existing processing barriers for AM. It allows for the production of macroscale components with nanoscale features, paving the way towards novel applications for colloid based structures, which are of potential interest to various industries, including aerospace and biomedicine.