DESIGN, FABRICATION AND PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF A 3D BIOPRINTER IN FABRICATION OF CARTILAGE SCAFFOLD

Abstract

The fourth industrial revolution has new tools, such as 3D printing, digital tools, and digital manufacturing that are having a positive impact on human evolution and benefiting in ways that have never been seen before. Technological and biological inventions are converging in the fourth industrial revolution. 3D bioprinting is one of the new inventions of the fourth industrial revolution, which is an advanced printing technology in the biological field. Different structures or prototypes are printed through a sequence of cross-sectional slices layer by layer. Recently, this technology has been frequently used in the fabrication of several tissues or organs, like the heart, skin, vessels, and so on, which can serve as in vitro models for drug screening, pharmaceutics, and so on, in addition to laying the groundwork for the very essential objective of organ transplantation. Moreover, 3D bioprinting plays an important role in providing useful methods to speed up the drug research process and introducing advanced vitro models. In this work, we fabricate a 3D bioprinter to print scaffolds of cartilage tissue. To evaluate its performance, hydrogels of SA-PVA in five different ratios (5:5, 6:4, 7:3, 8:2, 9:1) are prepared and three different dimensional pattern has been printed. For testing the quality of hydrogel, morphological test with SEM, chemical structure testing with FTIR and mechanical properties with UTM has been done. The result of all the tests shows that 8:2 composition of hydrogel is the most desirable hydrogel that discharge from syringe of the fabricated 3D bioprinter very smooth and continuously.