Abstract
The Arburg Plastic Freeforming process (APF) is a unique additive manufacturing material jetting method. In APF, a thermoplastic material is supplied as pellets, melted and selectively deposited as droplets, enabling the use of commercial materials in their original shape instead of filaments. The medical industry could significantly benefit from the use of additive manufacturing for the onsite fabrication of customized medical aids and therapeutic devices in a fast and economical way. In the medical field, the utilized materials need to be certified for such applications and cannot be altered in any way to make them printable, because modifications annul the certification. Therefore, it is necessary to modify the processing conditions rather than the materials for successful printing. In this research, a medical-grade poly(methyl methacrylate) was analyzed. The deposition parameters were kept constant, while the drop aspect ratio, discharge rate, melt temperatures, and build chamber temperature were varied to obtain specimens with different geometrical accuracy. Once satisfactory geometrical accuracy was obtained, tensile properties of specimens printed individually or in batches of five were tested in two different orientations. It was found that parts printed individually with an XY orientation showed the highest tensile properties; however, there is still room for improvement by optimizing the processing conditions to maximize the mechanical strength of printed specimens.
Highlights
Additive manufacturing (AM), colloquially known as 3D printing, has started to be a useful tool for the production of medical devices
All CYROLITE® materials have been approved for food contact, and they are USP Class VI and ISO 10993-1 certified [8]. The use of this grade as a permanent implant has not been discarded. That is why this investigation and many others are being performed as part of the CAMed (Clinical additive manufacturing for medical applications) project [27] to analyze its suitability as an implant material
The research shows the versatility of the Arburg Plastic Freeforming process (APF) process to use thermoplastic materials that have not been tailored for an additive manufacturing process in their standard granular form
Summary
Additive manufacturing (AM), colloquially known as 3D printing, has started to be a useful tool for the production of medical devices. There are still technical limitations of AM that need to be overcome to ensure a safe application in the medical field, such as the identification of materials that can be safely used in long term applications. Further essential aspects, such as identifying cleaning and sterilization methods that can be used with the different materials, have to be defined [2]. Another limitation is that materials need to be certified to produce parts for medical applications. Material producers go through this certification process for very few materials, Polymers 2020, 12, 2677; doi:10.3390/polym12112677 www.mdpi.com/journal/polymers
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