Rapid Fabrication of Hydrogel Microstructures Using UV-Induced Projection Printing

Micromachines

Wenguang Yang¹  Haibo Yu¹  Wenfeng Liang¹  Yuechao Wang¹  Lianqing Liu¹ 

[1] State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 114 Nanta Str., Shenhe Dist., Shenyang 110016, China;

关键词: microstructure fabrication;    polymers;    spatial light modulators;    cell chains;   

DOI  :  10.3390/mi6121464

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Fabrication of hydrogel microstructures has attracted considerable attention. A large number of applications, such as fabricating tissue engineering scaffolds, delivering drugs to diseased tissue, and constructing extracellular matrix for studying cell behaviors, have been introduced. In this article, an ultraviolet (UV)-curing method based on a digital micromirror device (DMD) for fabricating poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate (PEGDA) hydrogel microstructures was presented. By controlling UV projection in real-time using a DMD as digital dynamic mask instead of a physical mask, polymerization of the pre-polymer solution could be controlled to create custom-designed hydrogel microstructures. Arbitrary microstructures could also be fabricated within several seconds (<5 s) using a single-exposure, providing a much higher efficiency than existing methods, while also offering a high degree of flexibility and repeatability. Moreover, different cell chains, which can be used for straightforwardly and effectively studying the cell interaction, were formed by fabricated PEGDA microstructures.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.