The development of Smart Materials is largely being driven by emerging applications in control and environmental monitoring. To be useful, manufacturing processes must be available that are capable of forming micro-scale components with complex shapes and three dimensional geometries which can fully exploit the properties of these smart materials. In this paper, we consider the rapid prototyping of micro components using selective laser - and the so-called ‘digital light’ - processing methodologies.

The selective laser sintering of barium titanate components directly from powder beds and from spin-coated suspensions in a carrier photo-resist is discussed. The laser processing conditions and ambient environment are critical in achieving sintering. Peak laser power is found to be more influential than laser exposure time. The partial pressure of oxygen in the sintering environment is also critical in avoiding detrimental degradation of the ceramic.

Selective laser melting has been used to build high aspect ratio, three-dimensional NiTi components. The influence of laser dwell time and raster pitch on the density of NiTi shape memory alloy parts and their resolvable feature sizes is considered. The response of shape memory springs produced by this method is discussed.

Lastly the digital light processing of polymeric materials is reviewed as a potential route for the fabrication of piezoelectric polymer components. The use of mixtures of polymers such as an acrylic host combined with a piezoelectric constituent such as polyvinylidene fluoride is considered. The role of the UV photo sensitizer and its influence of the component performance will be reviewed.

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1. Recent development in the design of cyclopentadienyl-based precursors for the ALD of high-κ thin films