Pushing boundaries in 3D printing: Economic pressure filament extruder for producing polymeric and polymer-ceramic filaments for 3D printers

Fabrication of 3D-Printed Scaffolds with Multiscale Porosity

“…An alternative is to print scaffolds bypassing the production of filaments, such as by using bioprinters, which allow the work on smaller volumes of materials; however, bioprinters are advanced and expensive research equipment. Our solution to this problem is a pressure filament extruderan open-sourced, simple-to-build device with a total cost of about €350 . The device allows the production of meter-long filaments of acceptable quality using only about 30 g of the tested material.…”

“…Solutions of the plain polymer and polymer with β-TCP were poured onto a flat glass bed and dried at 40 °C for 24 h. The obtained polymer and polymer-ceramic foils were cut into 5 × 1 cm 2 strips and melted at 120 °C for 15 min in a stainless steel container with a pressure filament extruder. Our team developed the device and protocols used, and all details of the construction are presented in previous publications. , The melted polymer was extruded through a 2.85 mm nozzle by using an air pressure of 4 bar. The obtained filaments were collected on a flat steel bar as 1 m long segments.…”

“…This is due to a similar range of PCL and PEG melting point temperatures, for each polymer’s molecular weight range. To investigate this hypothesis, we decided to use our method of producing polymer and polymer-ceramic filaments , to obtain filaments from PCL, or composite filaments of PCL with the addition of β-TCP, and as porogen, we used two types of PEGs, differing in molecular weight. The use of PCL comes from the polymer’s proven biocompatibility and mechanical properties for producing bone implants. , At the same time, PCL’s low melting point (56–65 °C) allows mixing with materials sensitive to higher temperatures, such as PEG .…”

Mechanically suitable and osteoinductive 3D‐printed composite scaffolds with hydroxyapatite nanoparticles having diverse morphologies for bone tissue engineering

“…Our team developed the device used, and all details of the construction have been presented in previous publications. 27,28 The melted polymer was extruded through a 2.85 mm nozzle using 2-6 bar air pressure and collected on a flat steel bar as 1 m long filament segments. A sample of each filament is presented in Figure S1-S3 of the Supporting Information.…”

“…Both cited research groups indicated that adding the calcium stearate layer on the calcium phosphate surface should improve the connection between the particles and the polymer they are added to, leading to mechanically stable polymer/calcium phosphate composite formation. Thus, this paper presents the extrusion-based filament production 27 of PCL/nHAp composites for FFF 3D printing. The developed composition with modified nHAp allowed us to test the hypothesis that simple surface modification of nHAp facilitates the 3D printing of bioactive composite scaffolds with maintained or improved mechanical properties compared with pure polymers.…”