Enhancing the printing accuracy of melt electrowritten fibers deposited on aluminum foils

Abstract

Melt electrowriting (MEW) is an emerging extrusion-based additive manufacturing technology to process high-fidelity 3D scaffold. To date, the aluminum foil is a commonly-applied substrate to collect the melt electrowritten fibers. However, inaccurate fiber deposition cannot be efficiently avoided when printing on the aluminum foils. In this study, the effects of placing angle of the aluminum foil on the fiber deposition accuracy was investigated. In addition, to eliminate the human error, a planar pattern recognition algorithm was developed to evaluate the fiber deposition accuracy. It was found that the interactions between the fibers and the texture of the aluminum foils would influence the fiber deposition accuracy. The aluminum foil with 45° relative placement angle exhibited the smallest fiber deposition deviation ratio (less than 1.16%), which indicating that reducing the parallelism between the aluminum foil texture and the printed fiber path can significantly improve the printing resolution of MEW scaffold.