3D Printing News Briefs, September 20, 2025: Standards, Floor Slabs, Wastewater Treatment, & More – 3DPrint.com

In this weekend’s 3D Printing News Briefs, we’ll start with standards news from ASTM. Then, we’ll move on to a new 3D printable alloy from QuesTek Innovations, and Autodesk Research and Additive Tectonics are 3D printing floor slabs. We’ll end with research about 3D printed electrodes in sustainable wastewater treatment.

New ASTM Standard Hopes to Streamline Additive Manufacturing Processes

This month, ASTM International’s F42 additive manufacturing technologies committee approved a new standard that should help anyone who uses AM in a business-case capacity, including consumers, agencies, and manufacturers. The idea behind the soon to be published F3774 standard is to help ensure more clear communication across supply chains, by developing procedures for procurement and delivery of 3D printed parts. The standard should support communication of AM parts for stakeholders under different conditions, which means that it’s presented modularly: different aspects can be adopted, without having to adopt the entire standard. It will essentially provide a digital thread, which will be very helpful for stakeholders looking to have a part 3D printed but may not know exactly what information needs to be specified for manufacturing or validation to take place.

“The standard will provide reference information that is relevant to the design, manufacture, and inspection of an AM part. The standard will help users identify sets of information that are most relevant to best fit their needs and tailor data package requirements to this information,” said ASTM member Paul Witherell, a mechanical engineer at NIST.

QuesTek Gets Support from Aerospace, Energy Leaders for New Alloy Concept

Computational materials engineering company QuesTek Innovations is developing a high-temperature alloy design concept that’s optimized for AM. It’s partnering with a global leader in niobium production to create the alloy, and the concept is being shaped with support and input from aerospace and engineering industry leaders, including GE Vernova and Technetics Group. That’s because the intended applications for the next-generation alloy are in aerospace and energy, with a specific focus on application-specific performance, scalability, and supply chain resilience. The supporting companies will help make sure the high-temperature 3D printable alloy is properly aligned with real-world performance goals and manufacturing demands in the advanced equipment, power generation, and propulsion sectors.

The multi-phase alloy development project is leveraging QuesTek’s ICMD (Integrated Computational Materials Design) Software Platform in order to create a material that’s ready to handle the challenges of modern manufacturing. The alloy development is aligned with broader energy and sustainability goals, as its ability to support hotter, more efficient engines can help increase system efficiency and lower emissions. Plus, by optimizing the alloy for AM, manufacturing waste will be reduced, long tooling lead times will be eliminated, and agility and flexibility for manufacturers will increase. This is especially important at a time when advanced industries are dealing with growing pressure from materials scarcity, performance demand, and disruptions to the supply chain.

Autodesk Research, Additive Tectonics 3D Printing Greener Floor Slabs

Building concrete floors is labor-intensive, and wasteful, as the temporary formwork is often discarded after one use. Plus, geometry isn’t optimized to save weight, and the carbon cost is high: cement accounts for about 8% of global Co2 emissions, while steel adds between 7-9%. Autodesk Research is always on the lookout for innovative ways to solve challenges, and partnered up with Additive Tectonics to explore a new, greener approach to floors: 3D printed stay-in-place formwork, low-carbon geopolymer concrete, and natural fiber reinforcement. With its Selective Cement Activation (SCA) particle-bed AM method, Additive Tectonics specializes in large-scale architectural 3D printing of complex, structurally functional, high-resolution shapes.

The partners worked together to rethink each layer of a typical floor slab, starting with the formwork. They used Additive Tectonics’ upcycled econitWood composite material, instead of temporary wooden formwork. econitWood is a wood-mineral composite that locks in biogenic carbon, and Autodesk Inventor Nastran was used to optimize its geometry and create a ribbed form that follows the slab’s load paths. Flexible flax fibers were used for reinforcement, rather than carbon-intensive steel rebar, and Dynamo was used to translate structural stress maps into continuous winding paths. For the poured “concrete” part, they cast a potassium-activated geopolymer mortar, which seamlessly bonded to the flax-fiber. Their hard work paid off with a stronger, but more lightweight and sustainable, floor slab, and their approach is ready to scale.

3D Printed Electrodes Via MPECVD for Sustainable Wastewater Treatment

The synthesized 3D carbon scaffolds, enriched with B,N-doped carbon nanostructures, demonstrated superior performance in the electrochemical oxidation of β-blockers. Computational fluid dynamics simulations were used to optimize electrode design, leading to improved mass transport and reaction kinetics. Credit: Iwona Kaczmarzyk, Malgorzata Szopińska, Patryk Sokołowski, Simona Sabbatini, Gabriel Strugala, Jacek Ryl, Gianni Barucca, Per Falås, Robert Bogdanowicz, Mattia Pierpaoli.

Global concerns continue to grow about contaminants, like pharmaceuticals, in wastewater, and traditional treatment methods have limitations. A collaborative research team from Gdansk University of Technology in Poland, Università Politecnica delle Marche in Italy, and Lund University in Sweden have come up with a more sustainable solution. Using 3D printed molds, phase inversion, and microwave plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (MPECVD), they fabricated boron-nitrogen (B,N)-doped carbon electrodes, which have proven to perform well in the electrochemical oxidation (EO) of pollutants and offer a metal-free, scalable method for sustainable water treatment. Their electrodes are so innovative because the researchers integrated precision fabrication, topology optimization, and catalyst-free nanostructure growth to not only boost efficiency in wastewater treatment, but also to address critical pain points. A solution of polyacrylonitrile (PAN) and dimethylformamide (DMF) was cast into the 3D printed molds, made out of water-soluble filaments. Then, water immersion dissolved the mold and induced phase separation, which led to the formation of porous PAN scaffolds. Finally, using pyrolysis (thermal degradation) of PAN and MPECVD growth at the same time resulted in B,N-doped carbon nanowalls (CNWs). The optimized electrodes are reported to offer superior pollutant degradation when compared to conventional carbon-based ones.

“We prepared B,N-doped carbon electrodes with hierarchical porosity and a significantly enhanced surface area-to-volume ratio (up to 180%) compared to non-optimized analogues using a synergistic combination of 3D printing, phase inversion, and microwave plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition. This process allows the metal-free growth of vertically aligned carbon nanostructures directly onto polymer-derived substrates, resulting in a 20-fold increase in the electrochemically active surface area. Computational fluid dynamics simulations were used to improve mass transport and reduce pressure drop. Electrochemical characterization demonstrated that the optimized electrodes performed significantly better, achieving 4.7-, 4-, and 6.5-fold increases in the degradation rates of atenolol, metoprolol, and propranolol, respectively, during electrochemical oxidation,” the researchers wrote in their paper. “These results highlight the efficacy of the integrated fabrication and simulation approach in producing high-performance electrodes for sustainable wastewater treatment applications.”

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