Advancements in the Research of 4D Printing-A Review

4D printing is the method of 3D printing where the fourth dimension is the time and the shape or structure of the printed body which can change with respect to time. Many researches have conducted experiments to find if this new idea of 4D printing would work and have become successful in their research among them Skylar Tibbits is the first person to start the research in association with Stratasys and Autodesk. Hence the objective of this research work was to review about the different experiments conducted by different researches and prove that 4D printing technology is possible. In the present work, a survey of 4D printing was carried out and the different experimental procedures were discussed. Also the specifications of the technology used to demonstrate the experiment and their advantages are discussed. Few researchers have used the concepts of shape memory polymers to demonstrate their experiment and few have used the upcoming technology of the water absorbing materials and hydrogels to demonstrate their experiments. More or less the different materials used to demonstrate give the same result but what differ with respect to each other is with respect to their properties such as cost, availability, chemical properties, physical properties and etc. Final conclusion of the present work was that this technology is sure to change the world when put into work but because of the complexity it would take time for this to become a reality. 3D printing has already captured our mind and adding fourth dimension to the equation would do wonders which anyone on earth has ever witnessed till date.

[1]  Elisabetta A. Matsumoto,et al.  Biomimetic 4D printing. , 2016, Nature materials.