Abstract
Stereolithography (SLA)-based 3D printing has proven to have several advantages over traditional fabrication techniques as it allows for the control of hydrogel synthesis at a very high resolution, making possible the creation of tissue-engineered devices with microarchitecture similar to the tissues they are replacing. Much of the previous work in hydrogels for tissue engineering applications have utilised the ultraviolet (UV) chamber bulk photopolymerisation method for preparing test specimens. Therefore, it is essential to directly compare SLA 3D printing to this more traditional approach to elucidate the differences in hydrogels prepared by each fabrication method. Polyethyleneglycol dimethacrylate (PEGDMA) is an ideally suited material for a comparative study of the impact that SLA fabrication has on performance, as the properties of traditional UV chamber-cured hydrogels have been extensively characterised. The present study was conducted to compare the material properties of PEGDMA hydrogels prepared using UV chamber photopolymerisation and SLA 3D printing. From the subsequent testing, SLA-fabricated hydrogels were shown to maintain similar thermal and chemical performance to UV chamber-cured hydrogels but had a higher compressive strength and tensile stiffness, as well as increased hydrophilicity. These differences are attributed to the increased exposure to UV light SLA samples received compared to traditionally UV chamber-cured samples.
Highlights
Ultraviolet (UV) curing is a chemical reaction by which a polymerisable monomer or macromolecular monomer is exposed to UV radiation in the presence of a photoinitiator to form crosslinks
With respect to the gel fraction results in 1(B), both processes resulted in an unreacted monomer percentage below 5%, with results of 99.33% and 97.58% for the UV chamber and SLA samples, respectively
This study found that both polymerisation methods were successful in forming Polyethyleneglycol dimethacrylate (PEGDMA)-based hydrogels with less than 3% of PEGDMA monomer from either process being unreacted
Summary
Ultraviolet (UV) curing is a chemical reaction by which a polymerisable monomer or macromolecular monomer is exposed to UV radiation in the presence of a photoinitiator to form crosslinks. UV chamber curing is an advantageous technique as it allows for control over the spatial and temporal parameters of curing and has been a greatly utilised method in the fabrication of hydrogels It suffers from several disadvantages, such as oxygen inhibition and the potential for the unreacted monomer to be present post-cure [5,6]. An emerging technology which has shown the potential to advance polymer-based tissue-engineered devices is the 3D printing technique stereolithography (SLA) [7,8,9]. This technique has proven to have several advantages over traditional polymerisation techniques.
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