초록 열기/닫기 버튼
Three-dimensional (3-D) printing, with its capability for producing arbitrary shapes, has shown great potential for usage in patient-specific tissue engineering. However, if artificial tissues are fabricated directly through typical 3-D printing processes, the mechanical properties, particularly for softness or flexibility, significantly differ from those of natural tissues, resulting in inappropriate side effects during surgeries using vascular grafts. However, this can be overcome through the indirect 3-D printing of templates created with a thin-film formation process, such as dip coating. Dip coating is performed in two steps, including dipping/withdrawing a target base template from a polymer solution, and then drying the solvent into a solid thin film on the template. However, it is difficult to form a uniform layer on the arbitrary template because the gravitational flow of the coated solution disturbs the uniformity of the template as the solvent is drying. Therefore, we minimized the flow around the template after dip coating by rapidly removing the solvent removal by dipping the solution-coated template into ethanol. This reduced the solvent removal time and increased the viscosity of the coated solution, thereby alleviating the gravitational flow of the coated solution, and allowing us to successfully fabricate flexible vascular grafts.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
3D printing, Dip coating, Vascular graft, Thickness uniformity, Dissolution
