Investigation of process parameters in extrusion freeforming to make high resolution bioceramic lattice structures

Vaezi, Mohammad and Yang, Shoufeng (2014) Investigation of process parameters in extrusion freeforming to make high resolution bioceramic lattice structures. International Conference on Progress in Additive Manufacturing (Pro-AM 2014), Singapore, Singapore. 25 - 27 May 2014.

Abstract

Various fabrication methods including traditional chemical engineering methods and advanced Additive Manufacturing (AM) techniques are currently used for construction of tissue engineering (TE) scaffolds. Traditional techniques have several limitations as they usually can’t control pore size, pore geometry and spatial distribution of pores properly. In contrast, AM advanced techniques can simply control the internal and external structure of scaffolds and overcome some intrinsic limitations of conventional methods such as shape restrictions, manual intervention, inconsistent and inflexible processing procedures. In order to these advantages, there has been trend in recent years on fabrication of TE scaffolds using AM processes directly or indirectly. In particular, extrusion freeforming systems such as fused deposition modelling (FDM), bioplotting, robocasting, and solvent-based extrusion freeforming have been widely investigated for producing TE scaffolds and bioactive constructs due to their ability of processing different biomaterials, their possibility of manufacturing scaffolds in a cell-friendly environment, their high reproducibility and flexibility, and their simple process control in comparison with other AM techniques. Despite the daily progress in the use of extrusion freeforming methods in regenerative medicine there are still some aspects such as process resolution need to be improved to meet the requirement in different biomedical applications.

A solvent-based extrusion freeforming device was designed and set up to print 3D bioceramic lattice structures with highly uniform interconnected pores (as fine as 30 µm) for different application. Filaments can be delivered with high precision with diameters down to 60mm thanks to our unique nozzle design and the equipment built in-house at Southampton. The effect of nozzle die land on extrusion pressure was investigated and used as a guide to optimize the nozzle design to make high resolution bioceramic lattice structures with decrease extrusion pressure. In this talk, the effects of process parameters including nozzle size and die land, paste rheology, and bioceramic particle size on extrusion pressure, uniformity and resolution of the 3D printed lattice structures will be discussed in detail

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Contributors

Author: Shoufeng Yang

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