Sharif Digital Repository

Design and development of biodegradable scaffolds with highly uniform and controlled internal structure that stimulate tissue regeneration are the focus of many studies. The aim of this work is to apply a modified three-dimensional (3D) printing process to fabricate polymer-matrix composites with controlled internal architecture. Computationally-designed plaster molds with various pore sizes in the range of 300-800. μm were prepared by employing 3D printing of a water-based binder. The molds were converted to ε-polycaprolactone (PCL) and PCL/bioactive glass (BG) composite scaffolds by solvent casting and freeze drying methods. Optical and electron microscopy studies revealed that the pore... 

Globalization is one of the widely considered factors in today's manufacturing industries. This paradigm may be adopted for new technologies such as additive manufacturing. Additive manufacturing has been identified as an innovative manufacturing technology in recent years. The characteristics of this manufacturing technology, especially its support for quick design to manufacturing, have dominated it as an efficient generation of manufacturing techniques for today's global manufacturing paradigm. This article discusses the requirements and necessities of additive manufacturing with respect to a globalized perspective. Considering the two major requirements studied as integration of... 

Additive manufacturing (AM), is a new technology for the manufacturing of the physical parts through an additive manner. In the AM process, the orientation pattern of the part is an important variable that significantly influences the product properties such as the build time, the surface roughness, the mechanical strength, the wrinkling, and the amount of support material. The build time and the surface roughness are the more important criteria than others that can be considered to find the optimum orientation of parts. The designers and manufacturing engineers usually attempt to find an optimum solution to reach the product with high quality at the minimum time. Determining the optimum... 

Study of the plastic deformation in polymeric honeycombs can pave the way for understanding the deformation localization in more complex cellular structures, which have received progressive attention in the past few years. This study compares the strain localization in deforming honeycombs made by two cost-effective 3D-printing technologies. Hexagonal honeycombs and their unit cell models were 3D-printed by both PolyJet™, using a photo-crosslinkable polymer, and fused deposition modeling (FDM) using a thermoplastic material. The state of the art digital image correlation (DIC) technique was employed as the experimental route in order to calculate the strain field during the deformation of... 

Additive manufacturing (AM), is a new technology for the manufacturing of the physical parts through an additive manner. In the AM process, the orientation pattern of the part is an important variable that significantly influences the product properties such as the build time, the surface roughness, the mechanical strength, the wrinkling, and the amount of support material. The build time and the surface roughness are the more important criteria than others that can be considered to find the optimum orientation of parts. The designers and manufacturing engineers usually attempt to find an optimum solution to reach the product with high quality at the minimum time. Determining the optimum... 

According to the latest report from the World Health Organization, an estimated 265,000 deaths still occur every year as a direct result of burn injuries. A widespread range of these deaths induced by burn wound happens in low- and middle-income countries, where survivors face a lifetime of morbidity. Most of the deaths occur due to infections when a high percentage of the external regions of the body area is affected. Microbial nutrient availability, skin barrier disruption, and vascular supply destruction in burn injuries as well as systemic immunosuppression are important parameters that cause burns to be susceptible to infections. Topical antimicrobials and dressings are generally... 

Purpose: Hexagonal honeycombs with meso-metric cell size show excellent load bearing and energy absorption potential, which make them attractive in many applications. However, owing to their bend-dominated structure, honeycombs are susceptible to deformation localization. The purpose of this study is to provide insight about shear band propagation in struts of 3D-printed honeycombs and its relation to the achieved macroscopic mechanical behavior. Design/methodology/approach: Hexagonal honeycombs and unit cell models are 3D-printed by fused deposition modeling (FDM). The samples are exposed to compression loading and digital image correlation technique and finite element analyses are... 

Sintering is a processing technique in which loose particles consolidate at elevated temperatures to form porous monoliths. Sintering is also a critical stage in recent additive manufacturing method like selective laser sintering. In this study, using an affordable alternative to X-ray tomography technique, we analyze the pore structure evolution in sintered parts made of nascent high-density polyethylene (HDPE) particles in terms of pore surface genus and pore surface curvature. Also, we investigate the underlying microstructural development and macroscopic properties of sintered parts. It is observed that pore structure and macroscopic permeability are strongly influenced by the... 

As one of the most important additive manufacturing (AM) techniques, laser metal deposition (LMD) has been extensively studied specially during the last few years. Similar to other AM techniques, the quality of LMD parts is highly dependent on the processing parameters that need to be optimized so as to obtain geometrically accurate parts as well as favorable microstructures and, thus, mechanical properties. The present review paper therefore aims to present a critical analysis and overview of the relationship between processing parameters, microstructure, and mechanical properties of LMD components made from the Ti–6Al–4V alloy. Moreover, we discuss the applications of LMD parts in the... 

In order to regenerate bone defects, bioactive hierarchically scaffolds play a key role due to their multilevel porous structure, high surface area, enhanced nutrient transport and diffusion. In this study, novel hierarchically porous silk fibroin (SF) and silk fibroin-bioactive glass (SF-BG) composite were fabricated with controlled architecture and interconnected structure, by combining indirect three-dimensional (3D) inkjet printing and freeze-drying methods. Further, the effect of 45S5 Bioactive glass particles of different sizes (<100 nm and 6 μm) on mechanical strength and cell behavior was investigated. The results demonstrated that the hierarchical structure in this scaffold was... 

Electrohydrodynamic (EHD) printing is a novel technology used for fabricating high-resolution part features from a wide range of materials. Due to the multiphysics dynamics and the multiphase nature of the microdroplet formation in the EHD printers, modeling of this phenomenon is complicated. In this paper, the formation of a droplet in an EHD printer—under a pulsed electrical field—is simulated using a new numerical model which couples the fluid flow, the electric field distribution and the movement of the electric charges under dynamic and transient conditions. The level-set method is applied to the entire multiphysics domain in order to study the formation of the droplet. The presented... 

Fused Deposition Modeling with Polypropylene filament was employed to make a lap joint between Polypropylene and pre-punched Al-Mg alloy sheets, in the form of bonds between the polymeric substrate and the additive part and mechanical lock between the additive part and aluminum base sheet. Effects of the joint interface area (hole diameter of 5–13 mm) and preheating of the substrates (room temperature, 50 and 90℃) were investigated on the mechanical properties of the joints. Peak load in the tensile-shear and cross-tension tests increased with enhancement of the joint interface area (up to ˜280 N and ˜160 N, respectively). Higher joint strength in the tensile-shear test compared to the... 

In additive manufacturing processes, the part build orientation (PBO) is one of the most important factors that can affect the characteristics of the quality product such as the amount of support structure and the surface roughness. In most previous methods, the optimal PBO cannot be determined with high precision and accuracy in 3D space. In this paper, to find the precise and accurate optimal PBO with a desired angular accuracy, a new Taguchi-based method, called the Zooming-Taguchi method, is proposed. The proposed simulation-based method can precisely find the optimal PBO in absence of the noise effects. In order to find the optimal PBO with the desired angular resolution, the zooming... 

In the selective laser sintering (SLS) method, layers of powder are scanned by a laser beam and sintered. The thermal gradients created by laser heating and the subsequent cooling of the sintered sections results in thermal stresses and part warping in the final part. Thermal gradients are dependent on the scanning algorithm, in particular, the scan vector length. In this work, an efficient scanning algorithm for the SLS process is presented with the aim to minimise the part warping in the final part due to thermally induced residual stresses, while maintaining the production time at a minimum. The proposed algorithm is implemented in a finite element simulation and scanning parameters... 

Microchannels in hydrogels play an essential role in enabling a smart contact lens. However, microchannels have rarely been created in commercial hydrogel contact lenses due to their sensitivity to conventional microfabrication techniques. Here, we report the fabrication of microchannels in poly(2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate) (poly(HEMA)) hydrogels that are used in commercial contact lenses with a three-dimensional (3D) printed mold. We investigated the corresponding capillary flow behaviors in these microchannels. We observed different capillary flow regimes in these microchannels, depending on their hydration level. In particular, we found that a peristaltic pressure could reinstate flow in... 

Laminated polymer-steel composites are promising layered materials for practical applications in the automotive industry considering their superior crush resistance capacity in terms of enhanced damping potential. In this research, the sheet lamination (SL) route of friction stir additive manufacturing (FTAM) technology was implemented for the production of a poly-methyl-methacrylate (PMMA) polymer matrix composite structure as reinforced by textile stainless steel layers, and feeding of PMMA granulates inside the stirred region. Layers bonding and the soundness of composite formation during fabrication of the laminated structure were studied. Possible chemical interactions between the steel... 

Cell survival during the early stages of transplantation and before new blood vessels formation is a major challenge in translational applications of 3D bioprinted tissues. Supplementing oxygen (O2) to transplanted cells via an O2 generating source such as calcium peroxide (CPO) is an attractive approach to ensure cell viability. Calcium peroxide also produces calcium hydroxide that reduces the viscosity of bioinks, which is a limiting factor for bioprinting. Therefore, adapting this solution into 3D bioprinting is of significant importance. In this study, a gelatin methacryloyl (GelMA) bioink that is optimized in terms of pH and viscosity is developed. The improved rheological properties... 

Ferrofluid has been used in many fields, such as microfluidics, droplet formation, and heat transfer, due to its potential to be attracted in the presence of a magnetic field. Droplet formation, itself, has many applications such as emulsions, 3D micro-printers, MEMS, and electro-sprays. In this study, the mechanism of ferrofluid droplet formation from the nozzle in the presence of an alternating magnetic field was investigated. The magnetic coil was fixed at different angles with respect to gravity and the effect of the alternating magnetic field and the angle of the magnetic coil axis with respect to gravity on the produced droplet volume, satellite droplet, and droplet formation frequency... 

Pentamode metamaterials are a type of extremal designer metamaterials, which are able to demonstrate extremely high rigidity in one direction and extremely high compliance in other directions. Pentamodes can, therefore, be considered as building blocks of exotic materials with any arbitrarily selected thermodynamically admissible elasticity tensor. The pentamode lattices can then be envisioned to be combined to construct intermediate extremal materials, such as quadramodes, trimodes, and bimodes. In this study, we constructed several primary types of anisotropic pentamode lattices (with midpoint positioning of 10%, 15%, 20%, 25%, 30%, 35%, and 42% of the main unit cell diagonal) and then... 

Advances in biomanufacturing techniques have opened the doors to recapitulate human sensory organs such as the nose and ear in vitro with adequate levels of functionality. Such advancements have enabled simultaneous targeting of two challenges in engineered sensory organs, especially the nose: i) mechanically robust reconstruction of the nasal cartilage with high precision and ii) replication of the nose functionality: odor perception. Hybrid nasal organs can be equipped with remarkable capabilities such as augmented olfactory perception. Herein, a proof-of-concept for an odor-perceptive nose-like hybrid, which is composed of a mechanically robust cartilage-like construct and a biocompatible...