Additive nanomanufacturing extends conventional 3D printing into the nanoscale, enabling the fabrication of structures with features below 100 nm. This has become increasingly important as researchers seek reliable ways to translate nanoscale discoveries into functional devices across electronics, healthcare, energy, and materials science.
Image Credit: AnnaVel/Shutterstock.com
What is Additive Nanomanufacturing?
Nanotechnology underpins advances in multiple sectors, from semiconductor devices to drug delivery. With the global nanotechnology market projected to reach around $227 billion USD by 2032, scalable and reproducible manufacturing approaches are essential for commercial adoption.1
However, traditional manufacturing methods are often insufficient when taken to the nanoscale, lacking the precision and control required to manipulate individual atoms or molecules.
Additive nanomanufacturing addresses these challenges by extending layer-by-layer additive manufacturing principles to construct one-, two-, or three-dimensional structures with features typically smaller than 100 nm.
By combining digital, top-down design with bottom-up processes such as self-assembly, additive nanomanufacturing enables precise control over chemical reactions and energy delivery while maintaining high structural fidelity.
Importantly, many approaches reduce dependence on complex cleanroom infrastructure, offering more flexible and potentially cost-effective routes to nanoscale fabrication.2
Get all the details: Grab your PDF here!
How is it Different from Regular 3D Printing?
At the nanoscale, slight variations in structure or composition can significantly affect performance. Features below 50 nm often exhibit size-dependent electrical, optical, and mechanical properties, while fabrication is complicated by challenges in controlling crystallinity, doping, and defects.
At this scale, gravity is negligible, and surface interactions, such as Van der Waals forces, dominate, often causing unwanted adhesion. Meanwhile, Brownian motion, convection, and environmental vibrations can disrupt particle capture and structural alignment.
Additive nanomanufacturing aims to address these challenges by fabricating nanoscale structures with high resolution, accuracy, scalability, and cost efficiency across a range of materials, including biomaterials, ceramics, and metals, serving as a complementary approach that enables new manufacturing routes and design strategies.3
Approaches and Techniques in Additive Nanomanufacturing
Two-Photon Polymerization
Two-photon polymerization (TPP) is a widely used high-resolution 3D printing technique for photonic and nanoscale applications. A tightly focused femtosecond laser induces nonlinear absorption in a photosensitive resin, triggering localized polymerization within nanoscale volumes, or voxels.
Complex three-dimensional structures are built by overlapping these voxels as the laser or sample is scanned. Lateral resolutions of around 100 nm and axial resolutions near 300 nm are common, with sub-100 nm features achievable under optimized conditions, albeit with reduced throughput.
Commercial systems typically operate at lower resolutions to ensure reliability and repeatability.4
Dip-Pen Nanolithography
Dip-pen nanolithography is a scanning-probe-based additive technique that enables mask-free, direct writing of two-dimensional nanoscale features by transferring material from an ink-coated atomic force microscope tip to a substrate.
In this process, material deposition occurs via diffusion through a naturally forming nanoscale water meniscus under ambient conditions, allowing precise placement of organic, inorganic, and biological inks without the need for high-energy radiation or vacuum environments.
The method offers sub-50-nanometer feature sizes and exceptional positional accuracy, making it particularly suitable for patterning fragile or chemically sensitive materials, although its serial nature limits throughput.
Electrohydrodynamic Jet Printing
Electrohydrodynamic jet printing is an electrically driven additive process in which an applied electric field deforms a liquid meniscus at a nozzle into a Taylor cone, enabling the ejection of droplets or continuous jets with diameters far smaller than the nozzle size.
By controlling the electric field strength, the process can operate in pulsed, stable-jet, or atomization modes, allowing the direct writing of nanoscale features, three-dimensional structures, or uniform thin films.
The technique supports a wide range of functional inks, including polymers, nanoparticles, and biomolecules, and provides higher resolution than conventional inkjet printing while improving material efficiency.
Direct Laser Writing and Resist-Based Nanomanufacturing
Direct laser writing encompasses resist-based additive nanomanufacturing techniques in which focused laser beams locally modify a photoresist to define three-dimensional nanoscale architectures.
Multi-photon polymerization is the most widely used process in this context, where femtosecond laser pulses generate localized photopolymerization within a resist volume, which is subsequently developed to reveal the final structure.
The method enables true three-dimensional fabrication with nanoscale precision. It has been widely applied in photonics, metamaterials, and data storage, though it requires post-processing and remains limited by serial writing speeds.3
Laser Sintering Nanomanufacturing
Laser sintering at the nanoscale adapts principles of metal additive manufacturing by selectively fusing metallic nanoparticles to form nanostructures.
A thin layer of nanoparticles, such as silver or gold, is deposited onto a substrate, often by spin coating, to serve as the raw material. A focused continuous-wave (CW) laser is then scanned across the substrate to locally sinter the particles, thereby fusing them into the desired nanostructure. Then, unsintered particles are removed, revealing the final pattern.
Variations of this method exploit laser-induced dewetting of ultrathin metallic films to form metallic nanoscale islands, enabling the direct writing of two-dimensional patterns with tailored optical or electronic properties.
This technique allows precise, mask-free fabrication of functional nanoscale features.5
Recent Research and Developments
Image Credit: Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock.com
High-Strain Flexible Conductors for Wearables Using Ink-Based Nanomanufacturing
Traditional high-temperature microfabrication methods are incompatible with flexible substrates and emerging nanomaterials, limiting the development of wearable devices for monitoring vital signals or interfacing with the body.
To address this, a study published in Advanced Materials used ink-based additive nanomanufacturing to fabricate a highly stretchable conductor. A composite ink of silver flakes, Ecoflex, and Methyl isobutyl ketone (MIBK) in a mass ratio of 7.2:1.6:1.5 was printed onto a thin hydrogel substrate (~30 μm thick), where MIBK optimized the ink rheology for improved printability.
After printing, the solvent was evaporated at 60 °C, and the silver network was sintered at 110 °C. The hydrogel substrate provided energy dissipation, enabling the conductor to withstand strains up to 1780 % while maintaining mechanical resilience and stretchability.6,7
Fabricating Paper-Based Agricultural Sensors via Dry Additive Nanomanufacturing
Researchers at Auburn University developed paper-based temperature and humidity sensors via dry additive nanomanufacturing, providing an eco-friendly, cost-effective solution for monitoring crop production and storage.
They deposited silver nanoparticles directly onto commercially available paper using a layer-by-layer process, forming conductive electrodes on the porous cellulose fibers without the need for solvents, creating precise, functional, and biodegradable sensor patterns.
The sensors demonstrated high sensitivity and reliability, detecting relative humidity between 20 % and 90 % and temperatures from 25 °C to 50 °C.
In addition, these sensors are reusable and safely disposable, offering a promising approach to enhance precision agriculture and enable smart monitoring of greenhouse and farm conditions.8
Next-Generation FHEs Fabricated by Laser-Sintered Additive Nanomanufacturing
The development of flexible hybrid electronics (FHEs) has expanded rapidly across everything from healthcare to energy applications.
However, conventional lithography and existing direct-write methods, such as inkjet and aerosol jet printing, face challenges including the use of toxic solvents, substrate incompatibility, nozzle clogging, and high-temperature sintering.
To overcome these limitations, researchers demonstrated a novel additive nanomanufacturing (ANM) technique for printing conductive silver (Ag) and transparent indium tin oxide (ITO) on flexible polyimide and PET substrates.
In this approach, pure, dry nanoparticles were generated in situ via laser-plasma plume condensation under atmospheric argon, guided through a nozzle, and sintered in real-time onto the substrate, producing thin, highly conductive, and mechanically robust lines.
The researchers fabricated functional FHE devices, including NFC antenna tags, strain sensors, temperature sensors, and lighting circuits, which maintained reliable performance under repeated bending, stretching, and cycling.
This dry, flexible, and mechanically robust additive nanomanufacturing demonstrates significant potential as a transformative method for next-generation printed electronics and sensors.9
Saving this article for later Grab a PDF here.
Conclusion
Additive nanomanufacturing provides a precise and versatile route for fabricating nanoscale structures that are complicated or impractical to produce using conventional methods.
While challenges remain in scaling production, improving throughput, and ensuring reproducibility, ongoing research continues to refine materials, processes, and hybrid approaches.
As these techniques mature, additive nanomanufacturing is expected to play an increasingly important role in enabling advanced devices across electronics, healthcare, energy, and environmental technologies.
References and Further Reading
- Pawar. (2024). Global Nanotechnology Market Size, Share, and Trends Analysis Report – Industry Overview and Forecast to 2032. DataBridge https://www.databridgemarketresearch.com/reports/global-nanotechnology-market
- Koumoulos, E. P., Gkartzou, E., & Charitidis, C. A. (2017). Additive (nano)manufacturing perspectives: the use of nanofillers and tailored materials. Manufacturing Review, 4, 12–12. https://doi.org/10.1051/mfreview/2017012
- Engstrom, D. S., Porter, B., Pacios, M., & Bhaskaran, H. (2014). Additive nanomanufacturing – A review. Journal of Materials Research, 29(17), 1792–1816. https://doi.org/10.1557/jmr.2014.159
- Geng, Q., Wang, D., Chen, P., & Chen, S. (2019). Ultrafast multi-focus 3-D nano-fabrication based on two-photon polymerization. Nature Communications, 10(1), 2179. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-10249-2
- Zhao, C., Shah, P. J., & Bissell, L. J. (2019). Laser additive nanomanufacturing under ambient conditions. Nanoscale, 11(35), 16187–16199. https://doi.org/10.1039/c9nr05350f
- Xu, S., & Wu, W. (2020). Ink-Based Additive Nanomanufacturing of Functional Materials for Human-Integrated Smart Wearables. Advanced Intelligent Systems, 2(10), 2000117. https://doi.org/10.1002/aisy.202000117
- Kim, S. H., Jung, S., Yoon, I. S., Lee, C., Oh, Y., & Hong, J. M. (2018). Ultrastretchable Conductor Fabricated on Skin-Like Hydrogel-Elastomer Hybrid Substrates for Skin Electronics. Advanced materials (Deerfield Beach, Fla.), 30(26), e1800109. https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.201800109
- Jaiswal, S., Taba, A., Patel, A., & Masoud Mahjouri-Samani. (2025). Laser-assisted dry printing eco-friendly paper-based humidity and temperature sensors. Journal of Laser Applications, 37(1). https://doi.org/10.2351/7.0001652
- Ahmadi, Z., Lee, S., Patel, A., Unocic, R. R., Shamsaei, N., & Mahjouri-Samani, M. (2022). Dry Printing and Additive Nanomanufacturing of Flexible Hybrid Electronics and Sensors. Advanced Materials Interfaces, 9(12), 2102569. https://doi.org/10.1002/admi.202102569
Disclaimer: The views expressed here are those of the author expressed in their private capacity and do not necessarily represent the views of AZoM.com Limited T/A AZoNetwork the owner and operator of this website. This disclaimer forms part of the Terms and conditions of use of this website.