Inkjet printers are capable of printing at high resolution by ejecting extremely small ink drops. Established printing technology will be able to seed living cells, at micrometer resolution, in arrangements similar to biological tissues. We describe the use of a biocompatible inkjet head and our investigation of the feasibility of microseeding with living cells. Living cells are easily damaged by heat; therefore, we used an electrostatically driven inkjet system that was able to eject ink without generating significant heat. Bovine vascular endothelial cells were prepared and suspended in culture medium, and the cell suspension was used as "ink" and ejected onto culture disks. Microscopic observation showed that the endothelial cells were situated in the ejected dots in the medium, and that the number of cells in each dot was dependent on the concentration of the cell suspension and ejection frequency chosen. After the ejected cells were incubated for a few hours, they adhered to the culture disks. Using our non-heat-generating, electrostatically driven inkjet system, living cells were safely ejected onto culture disks. This microseeding technique with living cells has the potential to advance the field of tissue engineering.
A new surface mount system with a parallel arrangement of miniature manipulators was proposed for use in system downsizing. The miniature manipulator consists of a molded pantograph mechanism, which is composed of large-deflective hinges and links. The purpose in this study is to investigate the static and dynamic characteristics of the pantograph mechanism. The static characteristic is clarified to analyze the nonlinear moment at the hinges and the displacement error of the output point. The dynamic characteristic deals with the forces at the input and the hinges, along with the dynamic displacement error of the output point when the miniature manipulator is driven at 20 Hz, and the output point is moved on a U-shape for picking and placing works. We consider forced vibrations corresponding to natural frequencies and mode shapes of the pantograph mechanism. These investigations apply the Finite Element Method (ANSYS) and Multi-Body-System approach (SIMPACK) and different levels of modeling are compared.
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