Exploiting Generative Design for 3D Printing of Bacterial Biofilm Resistant Composite Devices

Abstract

As the understanding of disease grows, so does the opportunity for personalization of therapies targeted to the needs of the individual. To bring about a step change in the personalization of medical devices it is shown that multi‐material inkjet‐based 3D printing can meet this demand by combining functional materials, voxelated manufacturing, and algorithmic design. In this paper composite structures designed with both controlled deformation and reduced biofilm formation are manufactured using two formulations that are deposited selectively and separately. The bacterial biofilm coverage of the resulting composites is reduced by up to 75% compared to commonly used silicone rubbers, without the need for incorporating bioactives. Meanwhile, the composites can be tuned to meet user defined mechanical performance with ±10% deviation. Device manufacture is coupled to finite element modelling and a genetic algorithm that takes the user‐specified mechanical deformation and computes the distribution of materials needed to meet this under given load constraints through a generative design process. Manufactured products are assessed against the mechanical and bacterial cell‐instructive specifications and illustrate how multifunctional personalization can be achieved using generative design driven multi‐material inkjet based 3D printing.

Design of a programmable particle filtering medium using a novel auxetic metamaterial

“…GAs mimicthe natural selection and evolutionary process to improve certain features following a number of generations [46]. GAs have been utilised in structural optimization and design for AM in previous research [47]. To implement GA in this study, the number of generations was set to 50, population size was set to 20, the number of pairs of chromosomes to cross over in each generation was four and the number of chromosomes to be mutated in each generation was four.…”

A potential alternative to fungicides using actives-free (meth)acrylate polymers for protection of wheat crops from fungal attachment and infection

“…Overall, these results corroborate previous studies, which indicated a general lack of toxicity of these polymers to fungi, bacteria and mammalian cells. 20,[39][40][41] In fact, it was noted that the total growth yield of A. pullulans within the medium was >2-fold greater in pmMAOES-or pAODMBAcoated wells when compared to the uncoated wells ( p < 0.001), suggesting the possibility that A. pullulans might use these polymers as a nutrient source. A. pullulans is known to secrete an arsenal of digestive enzymes that are effective at breaking down materials for nutrient acquisition.…”

An Effective Route to the Additive Manufacturing of a Mechanically Gradient Supramolecular Polymer Nanocomposite Structure

“…Gradients of material composition have been demonstrated previously, (He et al, 2021;Levato et al, 2020) but these are generally limited to highly digitised variations in the composition. For example, when using extrusion, (Rupp et al, 2021) it is difficult to achieve variation of composition in the case of single material extrusion and it is limited to varying infill to produce a gradient.…”