Additive Manufacturing for Tissue Engineering Applications in a Temperature-Controlled Environment

In recent years, with the combination of tissue engineering and additive manufacturing technologies, the possibility of fabricating scaffolds with porosity and complex structure has been improved. Since the properties of most biomaterial inks are influenced by temperature and thereby affect the quality of the scaffolds, a controlled printing environment is very important. This study focuses on temperature monitoring from the nozzle to the working platform. A compact heating jacket is developed to heat the needle and sense its temperature inside the nozzle. It makes it very different from common cartridge heating mechanisms. Moreover, a semi-closed printing environment composed of an air curtain and temperature circulation device is developed to create a stable cooling environment. It improves the uniformity of the work platform and increases by 50% the cooling time efficiency. To demonstrate the robustness for a wide range of temperatures, this study presents two experiments of printing two biomaterial inks at body and low temperatures, respectively.