Abstract
Additive manufacturing has a great potential in terms of its capability to produce components with complex geometries and to make multi-material and composite products by combining different materials in a single manufacturing platform. Current trends for the multi-material extrusion additive manufacturing process are categorized by multi-nozzle systems and multi-material inlet systems. In the case of multiple nozzle system, materials are deposited from different nozzles in sequence. On the other hand, in the case of multi-material inlet system, different materials are sent into a mixing tube and deposited as a mixture of materials. In this case, functionally graded parts can be fabricated by changing the volume fraction of two or more materials. Hence, the fabrication of parts with a continuous material supply by varying ratios for the extrusion technologies requires the development of printing heads with suitable printing channels, capable of varying the mixing ratio of different materials. To evaluate the effect of different printing channel designs on the material’s flow pattern and the functionally graded material printability, this paper presents a three-dimensional transient computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation of the two miscible liquid-liquid system in a printing channel. Different geometries and materials are considered
Highlights
Bioprinting describes a novel tissue engineering approach to create cell-laden constructs [1,2]
The influence of the material inlet positions on the material fraction distributions were evaluated by considering the mass fraction contours across the printing channels and outlet cross-sections of those channels
It can be seen from the outlet cross-sections of the 45 ̊ inlet position (Figure 1c), the bright red colour for gelatine solution in Figure 1c and for alginate solution is fading into blurred blue and green colours as the fluids flow out from the mixing chamber, which is a clear indication that printing channel with 45 ̊ has a better material mixing performance during the printing process
Summary
Bioprinting describes a novel tissue engineering approach to create cell-laden constructs [1,2]. In this approach, additive manufacturing is used to print a bioink formed by a hydrogel containing cells and growth factors [3]. Ideal hydrogels should present relatively low viscosity, a shear-thinning behaviour and good permeability characteristics [4]. Bioprinting was used to create cell-laden constructs based on a single material and a single cell type (e.g. fibroblasts, keratinocytes, chondrocytes, stem cells) [7]. Advances in the field of additive manufacturing allowed to create multi-material and multi-cellular constructs using multi-head printing systems [8,9]. Each printing head usually operates with a single bioink
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