Published June 12, 2020
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Using chaotic advection for facile high-throughput fabrication of ordered multilayer micro- and nanostructures: continuous chaotic printing

Creators

  • 1. Brigham and Women's Hospital
  • 2. Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education
  • 3. Isfahan University of Medical Sciences
  • 4. University of California, Irvine
  • 5. Delee Corp.,, Mountain View 94041, CA, United States of America
  • 6. Ohio State University
  • 7. Department of Bioengineering. Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, University of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States of America
  • 8. Harvard University
  • 9. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • 10. Centro de Biotecnología-FEMSA, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Monterrey 64849, NL, México

Description

This paper introduces the concept of continuous chaotic printing, i.e. the use of chaotic flows for deterministic and continuous extrusion of fibers with internal multilayered micro- or nanostructures. Two free-flowing materials are coextruded through a printhead containing a miniaturized Kenics static mixer (KSM) composed of multiple helicoidal elements. This produces a fiber with a well-defined internal multilayer microarchitecture at high-throughput (>1.0 m min-1). The number of mixing elements and the printhead diameter determine the number and thickness of the internal lamellae, which are generated according to successive bifurcations that yield a vast amount of inter-material surface area (∼102 cm2 cm-3) at high resolution (∼10 µm). This creates structures with extremely high surface area to volume ratio (SAV). Comparison of experimental and computational results demonstrates that continuous chaotic 3D printing is a robust process with predictable output. In an exciting new development, we demonstrate a method for scaling down these microstructures by 3 orders of magnitude, to the nanoscale level (∼150 nm), by feeding the output of a continuous chaotic 3D printhead into an electrospinner. The simplicity and high resolution of continuous chaotic printing strongly supports its potential use in novel applications, including-but not limited to-bioprinting of multi-scale layered biological structures such as bacterial communities, living tissues composed of organized multiple mammalian cell types, and fabrication of smart multi-material and multilayered constructs for biomedical applications.
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