This work presents a novel development to accelerate the printing speed of photopolymerization-based process by improving resin curability with nanosilica fillers. The nanosilica particles are revealed as “superior catalysts” that altered the light scattering characteristics of the resin. By taking advantage of the large number of compact nucleation sites on their surfaces, the nanosilica facilitated remarkably fast curing rates by greatly reducing the curing time for each layer of printing from 4 s to 0.7 s. The addition of nanosilica into shape memory polymers (SMPs) resins has also invoked new development of SMP composites as reinforced 4D printing materials. The particle-polymer interaction was carefully tuned to control the plasticizing effect of nanosilica domains in the polymer chains. The printed composites exhibited improvement in mechanical properties by an order of magnitude and greater elongation of 85.2 % as compared to their neat SMPs. The multifunctional crosslink nature of the nanosilica also maintained the shape recovery ratio within a high range of 87–90%. This work achieves fresh mechanistic insights in the critical role and influences of nanosilica in developing high speed 3D printing technology and opens up newly-developed high-performance material.

这项工作提出了一种新的发展，通过提高纳米二氧化硅填料的树脂固化性来加快基于光聚合的工艺的印刷速度。纳米二氧化硅颗粒被揭示为“高级催化剂”，改变了树脂的光散射特性。通过利用其表面上大量致密的成核位点，纳米二氧化硅通过将每层印刷的固化时间从4 s大大减少到0.7 s，大大加快了固化速度。将纳米二氧化硅添加到形状记忆聚合物（SMP）树脂中也引起了SMP复合材料作为增强型4D打印材料的新发展。仔细调整了粒子与聚合物之间的相互作用，以控制聚合物链中纳米二氧化硅域的增塑作用。与纯SMP相比，印刷复合材料的机械性能提高了一个数量级，伸长率提高了85.2％。纳米二氧化硅的多功能交联性质也将形状恢复率保持在87-90％的高范围内。这项工作在纳米二氧化硅在发展高速3D打印技术中的关键作用和影响方面获得了新的机械见解，并开辟了新开发的高性能材料。