• Nie, Yunfeng
• Ottevaere, Heidi
• Madrid Sánchez, Alejandro
• Duerr, Fabian

Abstract

Three-dimensional (3D) bioprinting approaches that enable large-scale constructs and high-resolution simultaneously are<br/>very attractive to tissue engineering applications and health industries. However, both characteristics hardly meet at<br/>reasonable printing times in current 3D bioprinting technologies, affecting the introduction of 3D scaffolds in medical<br/>applications. To overcome this limitation, we recently introduced a vat photopolymerization (VP)-based bioprinting<br/>method named light sheet stereolithography (LS-SLA) and demonstrated the fabrication of centimeter-scale scaffolds with<br/>micrometer-scale features (&gt; 13 μm) by using off-the-shelf optical compounds. The high performance in LS-SLA results<br/>from using a rectangular uniform beam instead of a rotational symmetric laser beam, which generates light sheets with<br/>large length-to-width aspect ratios on the vat film. Beam shaping optics are components used to perform the beam<br/>transformation, and guarantee the accuracy, uniformity, and size of the 3D constructs. This work proposes freeform optics<br/>to perform the laser beam shaping in the LS-SLA device and describes the progress of our investigations from design to<br/>proof-of-concept-demonstrating. The results show that rectangular beams are readily produced by freeform optics resulting<br/>in compact and energy efficient systems, and that further considerations on the real laser output are necessary to deliver<br/>high beam uniformities. Tackling the design challenges of this work leads to energy efficient and high accuracy LS-SLA<br/>systems.

Topics

• compound
• laser sintering
• vat photopolymerization