Abstract
Pure cellulose nanocrystal (CNC) aerogels with controlled 3D structures and inner pore architecture are printed using the direct ink write (DIW) technique. While traditional cellulosic aerogel processing approaches lack the ability to easily fabricate complete aerogel structures, DIW 3D printing followed by freeze drying can overcome this shortcoming and can produce CNC aerogels with minimal structural shrinkage or damage. The resultant products have great potential in applications such as tissue scaffold templates, drug delivery, packaging, etc., due to their inherent sustainability, biocompatibility, and biodegradability. Various 3D structures are successfully printed without support material, and the print quality can be improved with increasing CNC concentration and printing resolution. Dual pore CNC aerogel scaffolds are also successfully printed, where the customizable 3D structure and inner pore architecture can potentially enable advance CNC scaffold designs suited for specific cell integration requirements.
Highlights
Recent developments in processing highly functional 3D aerogel structures have been rapid[16, 17], there is an increasing need for more biocompatible and biodegradable aerogels within the biomedical, cosmetics, pharmaceutical, and even packaging fields[18, 19]
Studart et al have reported CNC architectures printed via the direct ink write (DIW) approach, where CNC alignments were achieved during 3D printing[30]
We report DIW printing of pure CNC aerogels with complex structures and customizable inner pore architectures
Summary
Recent developments in processing highly functional 3D aerogel structures have been rapid[16, 17], there is an increasing need for more biocompatible and biodegradable aerogels within the biomedical, cosmetics, pharmaceutical, and even packaging fields[18, 19]. Heath et al.[26] fabricated high porosity aerogels through solvent exchange with alcohol followed by super critical CO2 drying, and the resultant aerogels can lead to potential applications such as supports for catalysis, filters, or storage materials. There have been increasing interests in utilizing 3D printing and wood based-materials for the fabrication of cellulosics structures with complex shapes. We report DIW printing of pure CNC aerogels with complex structures and customizable inner pore architectures. To further enable inner pore architecture and overall structural customization, it was necessary to carefully control the aerogel’s Computer Aided Designs (CAD), gel formulations, DIW processing parameters, and nozzle tip size. This work provided a unique solution for fabricating dual pore CNC aerogel 3D structures with controllable porosity, resolution, overall shape, and inner pore architecture
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