Fundamentals of Scaffolds Fabrication Using Low Temperature Additive Manufacturing
In the last two decades, additive manufacturing (AM) has made significant progress towards the fabrication of biomaterials and tissue-engineering constructs. One direction of research is focused on the development of mechanically stable implants with pati
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Fundamentals of Scaffolds Fabrication Using Low Temperature Additive Manufacturing
5.1
Introduction
Conceptually, additive manufacturing technology is a layer-by-layer fabrication technology of three-dimensional physical models directly from computer-aided design (CAD). Additive Manufacturing (AM), also known as “Rapid Prototyping” is said to be the next global industrial and technological revolution [1–5]. In most sectors of industry, the utilization of AM is possible and might lead to a radical change of production processes. The outcome of this will be cost reduction and more customer-specific solutions. It has been claimed that additive manufacturing can cut down the product costs by up to 70–90 % [6–8]. In the medical field, AM will be a crucial factor for the implementation of the “Personalized Medicine” concept, aiming for more individual and therefore patient-specific therapeutic options [9]. As will be discussed in this chapter, a complex internal pore network can be constructed using the additive manufacturing process [10]. Furthermore, the build-on-demand nature of additive manufacturing provides the flexibility to create a patient-specific implant with custom-made architectures [10–12]. Therefore, in order to reconstruct the damaged tissue, scaffolds fabricated by additive manufacturing methods are reported to be more advantageous over conventional 3D scaffolds. This is in view of the fact that additive manufacturing enables the incorporation of drugs/proteins as well as cells during scaffold manufacturing, and produces very complex architecture similar to bone [12–14]. The medical applications of additive manufacturing (AM) are second largest only after the automobile sector [15]. This indicates the high commercial feasibility (market readiness) of existing AM technology to fabricate with metallic and ceramic materials and synthetic polymers. With these technologies, implants with patient-specific sizes and shapes can be manufactured based on three-dimensional © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017 B. Basu, Biomaterials for Musculoskeletal Regeneration, Indian Institute of Metals Series, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-3059-8_5
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imaging techniques like computer (CT) and magnetic resonance tomography (MRT). Such implants, in most cases, aim for the permanent replacement of a missing tissue, like in the case of skull implants made of titanium. Concerning the economical aspect, AM represents a potentially growing market in many manufacturing sectors with a global market of $1843.2 million in 2012, and it is expected to grow at a CAGR of 13.5 % to reach $3,471.9 million by 2017 [15]. Market Research estimates that the 3D printing market for medical applications generated revenues of nearly $346 million in 2012, and that the number will grow to almost $1 billion by 2019 [16]. Evolved as an alternative to conventional scaffold fabrication technologies, additive manufacturing has been used in the biomedical engineering field, mainly for producing models and prototy
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