Synergizing algorithmic design, photoclick chemistry and multi-material volumetric printing for accelerating complex shape engineering

Abstract

Accelerating the designing and manufacturing of complex shapes has been a driving factor of modern industrialization. This has led to numerous advances in computational design and modeling and novel additive manufacturing (AM) techniques that can generate and fabricate complex shapes for bespoke applications. By combining new new coding-based design approach with advanced AM techniques for high-throughput fabrication, we envision a new approach to transform the way we design and fabricate complex shapes. Here, we demonstrate an algorithmic voxel-based approach, which can rapidly generate and analyze porous structures, auxetic meshes and cylinders, or perfusable constructs. We use this design scheme in conjunction with new approaches for multi-material volumetric printing based on thiol-ene photoclick chemistry to rapidly fabricate complex heterogeneous structures. Collectively, the new design and fabrication technique we demonstrate can be used across a wide-spectrum of products such as actuators, biomedical implants and grafts, or tissue and disease models.

3D Bioprinting in Microgravity: Opportunities, Challenges, and Possible Applications in Space

“…Recently, multiple schemes for volumetric printing of multimaterial constructs, in which multiple cell types can even be compartmentalized into specific regions of the constructs, were demonstrated. [121,122] Potential applications include mimicking interfaces across different tissues (i.e., muscleto-tendon), and multi-walled tissues (i.e., blood vessels). The accuracy of volumetric printing and related processes is dependent on a variety of factors related to the optical properties (light absorptivity, refractive index, and light scattering of the resin and cells), physicochemical properties (viscosity, degree of substitution, etc.)…”