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Additive manufacturing, also known as three-dimensional (3D) printing, is an approach in which a structure may be fabricated layer by layer. For 3D inkjet printing, droplets are ejected from a nozzle and each layer is formed droplet by droplet. Inkjet printing has been widely applied for the fabrication of 3D biological gel structures, but the knowledge of the microscale interactions between printed droplets is still largely elusive. This study aims to elucidate the alginate layer formation process during drop-on-demand inkjet printing using high speed imaging and particle image velocimetry. Droplets are found to impact, spread, and coalesce within a fluid region at the deposition site, forming coherent printed lines within a layer. Interfaces are found to form between printed lines within a layer depending on printing conditions and printing path orientation. The effects of printing conditions on the behavior of droplets during layer formation are discussed and modeled based on gelation dynamics, and recommendations are presented to enable controllable and reliable fabrication of gel structures.
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Making droplets from highly viscous liquids by pushing a wire through a tube
Drop-on-demand (DOD) printing is a versatile manufacturing tool, which has been widely used in applications ranging from graphic products to manufacturing of ceramics, even for cell engineering. However, the existing DOD methods cannot be applied for highly viscous materials: the printing technologies are typically limited to the inks with the water level viscosity and fall short to eject jets from thick fluids and break them into droplets. To address this challenge, a new wire-in-a-tube technology for drop generation has been developed replacing the nozzle generator with a wire-in-a-tube drop generator. We successfully formed droplets on demand from highly viscous (∼10 Pa s) liquids and studied the mechanisms of drop formation in the wire-in-a-tube drop generators. These mechanisms couple unique fluid mechanics, capillarity, and wetting phenomena providing a new platform that can be used in different microfluidic applications.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1655740
- PAR ID:
- 10364386
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Institute of Physics
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Physics of Fluids
- Volume:
- 34
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 1070-6631
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- Article No. 032119
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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