Filament‐Based Melt Electrowriting Enables Dual‐Mode Additive Manufacturing for Multiscale Constructs
Kilian Maria Arthur Mueller,
Annika Hangleiter,
Sarah Burkhardt,
Diana Marcela Rojas-González,
Christina Kwade,
Sebastian Tobias Pammer,
Stefan Leonhardt,
Petra Mela
Affiliations
Kilian Maria Arthur Mueller
Chair of Medical Materials and Implants Department of Mechanical Engineering TUM School of Engineering and Design Munich Institute of Biomedical Engineering Technical University of Munich Boltzmannstraße 15 85748 Garching Germany
Annika Hangleiter
Chair of Medical Materials and Implants Department of Mechanical Engineering TUM School of Engineering and Design Munich Institute of Biomedical Engineering Technical University of Munich Boltzmannstraße 15 85748 Garching Germany
Sarah Burkhardt
Chair of Medical Materials and Implants Department of Mechanical Engineering TUM School of Engineering and Design Munich Institute of Biomedical Engineering Technical University of Munich Boltzmannstraße 15 85748 Garching Germany
Diana Marcela Rojas-González
Chair of Medical Materials and Implants Department of Mechanical Engineering TUM School of Engineering and Design Munich Institute of Biomedical Engineering Technical University of Munich Boltzmannstraße 15 85748 Garching Germany
Christina Kwade
Chair of Medical Materials and Implants Department of Mechanical Engineering TUM School of Engineering and Design Munich Institute of Biomedical Engineering Technical University of Munich Boltzmannstraße 15 85748 Garching Germany
Sebastian Tobias Pammer
Kumovis GmbH Flößergasse 4 81369 München Germany
Stefan Leonhardt
Kumovis GmbH Flößergasse 4 81369 München Germany
Petra Mela
Chair of Medical Materials and Implants Department of Mechanical Engineering TUM School of Engineering and Design Munich Institute of Biomedical Engineering Technical University of Munich Boltzmannstraße 15 85748 Garching Germany
Melt electrowriting (MEW) is an electric‐field‐assisted fiber‐forming biofabrication strategy for the additive manufacturing (AM) of precisely defined 3D microarchitectures. MEW is based on pressure‐driven extrusion of a polymer melt pool, currently mainly implemented at laboratory scale with specialized machine technology and limited to only few materials. This precludes the accessibility of MEW to a broader user group and can become the bottleneck of MEW's technological advancement. In contrast to conventional MEW, a filament‐based approach (F‐MEW) is introduced that exploits the technological ecosystem of fused filament fabrication (FFF), a globally used transformative AM technique. In this work, a polymer filament serves as feedstock material and is melted just on demand. By upgrading existing FFF systems, MEW of polymer microfibers is enabled, as validated with polycaprolactone (PCL) and demonstrated with direct writing of thermosensitive polydioxanone (PDO). Finally, FFF and F‐MEW are hybridized in a dual‐mode AM process. This enables multiscale constructs featuring both FFF struts and one order of magnitude smaller F‐MEW microfibers. This work opens the accessibility of F‐MEW to the large FFF user group, potentially benefitting from the plethora of filaments available for FFF, while, at the same time, expanding the FFF fabrication window.
