Paul Dalton

@daltonlab.bsky.social

Associate Professor at the Knight Campus, Oregon. 3D printing fanboy; tissue engineer & scaffold designer, teacher, entrepeneur, lover of the outdoors, melt electrowriting inventor. #Biofabrication, #MEW, #3Dprinting, #bioengineering, #meltelectrowriting

With a bluesky account, here is a blast from the past and a test of threads. doi.org/10.1002/adma... changes a fundamental which unlocks geometric freedom for melt electrowriting (MEW). Instead of direct-writing fibers directly on top of each other, the fiber-on-fiber position can be controlled....

A classic melt electrowriting (MEW) video. With a nozzle-collector gap of 3.5 mm, a polycaprolactone melt is extruded to a 5.75kV charged 22G nozzle, thinning out into a fine microfiber. The jet speed is 260mm/min and although the collector speed increases, it never breaks. doi.org/10.1002/admt...

This is an artifical full-thickness skin that was made in partnership with L'Oreal, published in 2024 here: doi.org/10.1002/adfm... With MEW fibers providing a scaffold for the fibroblasts + an electrospun membrane as an artificial basement membrane, a high quality full-thickness model was created.

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My first share comes from alumni Dr Moatazbellah Youssef, who beautifully shows the printing resolutions of MEW. Corbion PC-12, 2.5 micron fibers, 50 micron spacing. I love this image as it shows the difference in scale - the 100 micron scale bar is about as small as one can get from melt extrusion.

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Let's start this account with some science from a fanboy - we try to increase volumetric printing resolution AND improve the cost. We did both and now have some PEGDA resins that cost 2c/print. In revision but hopefully soon to be published!