The predictive compensation path research of the micro tube fabrication process

Abstract

Inkjet-based organ printing or 3D organ printing can be implemented using orifice-based and orifice-free approaches. Inkjetting, the most widely used orifice-based fabrication approach, has been applied to fabricate various biological constructs, such as alginate tubes. There are two main factors that may lead to failure during the fabrication of the tubular constructs with an overhang using horizontal printing: Structure instability due to the moment imbalance and structure failure due to the droplet impact-induced crash or buckling. This study aims to investigate how to theoretically construct a predicted tube printing path which can compensate for deformation in the printing process. First, we discuss the influence of stress in the printing process, subsequently we proceed to simulate the printing of the tube as a thin curved beam under droplet impact force, and obtain the unchanged shape information from the deformed shape, and then we put forward the predicted-path algorithm of the tube fabrication (PPATF). Second, we verify the method effectiveness and correctness by constructing the predicted path of a tube of 6 mm diameter and using finite element analysis (FEA) to simulate the deformation in the printing process. Lastly, we use the predicted path to print the tube. The cross section of the fabricated constructs can be nearly circular with the predictive compensation path.