Synergizing algorithmic design, photoclick chemistry and multi-material volumetric printing for accelerating complex shape engineering

Abstract

Accelerating the designing and manufacturing of complex shapes has been a driving factor of modern industrialization. This has led to numerous advances in computational design and modeling and novel additive manufacturing (AM) techniques that can create complex shapes for bespoke applications. By combining a new coding-based design approach with high-throughput volumetric printing, we envision a new approach to transform the way we design and fabricate complex shapes. Here, we demonstrate an algorithmic voxel-based approach, which can rapidly generate and analyze porous structures, auxetic meshes and cylinders, or perfusable constructs. We use this design scheme in conjunction with new approaches for multi-material volumetric printing based on thiol-ene photoclick chemistry to rapidly fabricate complex heterogeneous structures. Collectively, the new design and fabrication technique we demonstrate can be used across a wide-spectrum of products such as actuators, biomedical implants and grafts, or tissue and disease models. TeaserA new scheme of rapidly designing and printing complex multi-material structures for implant and tissue graft applications.