This paper presents an innovative design and fabrication workflow for a lightweight composite slab prototype that combines mineral foam 3D printing (F3DP) and concrete casting. Non-standardized concrete elements that are geometrically optimized for resource efficiency often result in complex shapes that are difficult to manufacture. This paper extends the research in earlier studies, showing that F3DP can address this challenge. F3DP is used to construct 24 stay-in-place formwork elements for a lightweight, resource-efficient ribbed concrete element with a 2 × 1.3 m footprint. This advancement highlights the improved robotic F3DP setup, computational design techniques for geometry and print path generation, and strategies to achieve near-net-shape fabrication. The resulting prototype shows how complex geometries that were previously cost-prohibitive can be produced efficiently. Discussing the findings, challenges, and future improvements offers useful perspectives and supports the development of this resourceful and sustainable construction technique.

Injectable thermoresponsive hydrogels are elegant scaffolds for tissue engineering. Cells and biomolecules can be directly embedded in the gel precursor solution, which then gels at body temperature. Significant advances have been made in this field over the past two decades. The ease with which the hydrogel properties can be tailored has generated a number of different scaffolds for cartilage and bone tissue engineering, as well as for cardiac and neural applications. In this chapter, we provide a concise overview of the general properties of thermogels for tissue engineering applications. We focus on some of the materials developed for bone and cartilage tissue engineering, including pNiPAAm, chitosan, PEG-PGLA and PEG-PCL based thermogels. Interesting aspects of the gelling mechanism and original approaches are described, highlighting the importance of long term, in vivo investigations to assess biodegradability, cytotoxicity and the host response.