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Polymers
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Additive Manufacturing of Biopolymers and Their Applications
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Additive Manufacturing of Biopolymers and Their Applications

A special issue of Polymers (ISSN 2073-4360). This special issue belongs to the section "Polymer Applications".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (25 June 2022) | Viewed by 14030

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Eleonora Ferraris

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Campus de Nayer, 2860 Sint-Katelijne-Waver, Belgium
Interests: additive manufacturing; hydrogel printing; jet based printing
Prof. Dr. Lorenzo Moroni

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department Complex Tissue Regeneration (CTR), MERLN Institute for Technology-Inspired Tissue Regeneration, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands
Interests: biofabrication; stem cells; regenerative medicine; tissue engineering
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Biopolymers, such as collagen, alginate, silk fibroin, chitosan, alginate, cellulose, and starch, have various applications in the food industry, biomedical engineering, regenerative medicine, agriculture, packaging, and the pharmaceutical industry, due to their inherent biocompatibility, bioactivity, and biodegradability. Additive manufacturing of biopolymers, in particular, offers new opportunities, enabling the manufacturing of 3D structures and materials with specific patterns and properties. For instance, significant progress has been made in the field of biomedical and tissue engineering. The aim of this Special Issue is to build a community of authors and readers to discuss the latest research in this domain. This Special Issue will cover the wide spectrum of design, modeling, and processing aspects dealing with the 3D printing of biopolymers and their related applications. The technological areas of interest include, but are not limited to, naturally derived and synthetic biopolymers for 3D printing, bioprinting, the 3D printing of hydrogels, tissue engineering, personalized medicine, and organs on chips.

Prof. Dr. Eleonora Ferraris
Prof. Dr. Lorenzo Moroni
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Polymers is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • biopolymers
  • natural hydrogels
  • additive manufacturing
  • 3D (bio-)printing
  • biomedical engineering

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Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

24 pages, 5533 KiB  
Article
Influence of Multiple Thermomechanical Processing of 3D Filaments Based on Polylactic Acid and Polyhydroxybutyrate on Their Rheological and Utility Properties
by Roderik Plavec, Vojtech Horváth, Slávka Hlaváčiková, Leona Omaníková, Martina Repiská, Elena Medlenová, Jozef Feranc, Ján Kruželák, Radek Přikryl, Silvestr Figalla, Soňa Kontárová, Andrej Baco, Lucia Danišová, Zuzana Vanovčanová and Pavol Alexy
Polymers 2022, 14(10), 1947; https://doi.org/10.3390/polym14101947 - 11 May 2022
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 2195
Abstract
This study focused on material recycling of a biodegradable blend based on PLA and PHB for multiple applications of biodegradable polymeric material under real conditions. In this study, we investigated the effect of multiple processing of a biodegradable polymer blend under the trade [...] Read more.
This study focused on material recycling of a biodegradable blend based on PLA and PHB for multiple applications of biodegradable polymeric material under real conditions. In this study, we investigated the effect of multiple processing of a biodegradable polymer blend under the trade name NONOILEN®, which was processed under laboratory as well as industrial conditions. In this article, we report on testing the effect of blending and multiple processing on thermomechanical stability, molecular characteristics, as well as thermophysical and mechanical properties of experimental- and industrial-type tested material suitable for FDM 3D technology. The results showed that the studied material degraded during blending and subsequently during multiple processing. Even after partial degradation, which was demonstrated by a decrease in average molecular weight and a decrease in complex viscosity in the process of multiple reprocessing, there was no significant change in the material’s thermophysical properties, either in laboratory or industrial conditions. There was also no negative impact on the strength characteristics of multiple processed samples. The results of this work show that a biodegradable polymer blend based on PLA and PHB is a suitable candidate for material recycling even in industrial processing conditions. In addition, the results suggest that the biodegradable polymeric material NONOILEN® 3D 3056-2 is suitable for multiple uses in FDM technology. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Additive Manufacturing of Biopolymers and Their Applications)
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17 pages, 2908 KiB  
Article
High-Resolution Bioprinting of Recombinant Human Collagen Type III
by Rory Gibney, Jennifer Patterson and Eleonora Ferraris
Polymers 2021, 13(17), 2973; https://doi.org/10.3390/polym13172973 - 1 Sep 2021
Cited by 29 | Viewed by 5226
Abstract
The development of commercial collagen inks for extrusion-based bioprinting has increased the amount of research on pure collagen bioprinting, i.e., collagen inks not mixed with gelatin, alginate, or other more common biomaterial inks. New printing techniques have also improved the resolution achievable with [...] Read more.
The development of commercial collagen inks for extrusion-based bioprinting has increased the amount of research on pure collagen bioprinting, i.e., collagen inks not mixed with gelatin, alginate, or other more common biomaterial inks. New printing techniques have also improved the resolution achievable with pure collagen bioprinting. However, the resultant collagen constructs still appear too weak to replicate dense collagenous tissues, such as the cornea. This work aims to demonstrate the first reported case of bioprinted recombinant collagen films with suitable optical and mechanical properties for corneal tissue engineering. The printing technology used, aerosol jet® printing (AJP), is a high-resolution printing method normally used to deposit conductive inks for electronic printing. In this work, AJP was employed to deposit recombinant human collagen type III (RHCIII) in overlapping continuous lines of 60 µm to form thin layers. Layers were repeated up to 764 times to result in a construct that was considered a few hundred microns thick when swollen. Samples were subsequently neutralised and crosslinked using EDC:NHS crosslinking. Nanoindentation and absorbance measurements were conducted, and the results show that the AJP-deposited RHCIII samples possess suitable mechanical and optical properties for corneal tissue engineering: an average effective elastic modulus of 506 ± 173 kPa and transparency ≥87% at all visible wavelengths. Circular dichroism showed that there was some loss of helicity of the collagen due to aerosolisation. SDS-PAGE and pepsin digestion were used to show that while some collagen is degraded due to aerosolisation, it remains an inaccessible substrate for pepsin cleavage. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Additive Manufacturing of Biopolymers and Their Applications)
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Graphical abstract

17 pages, 3971 KiB  
Article
Product Design by Additive Manufacturing for Water Environments: Study of Degradation and Absorption Behavior of PLA and PETG
by Daniel Moreno Nieto, María Alonso-García, Miguel-Angel Pardo-Vicente and Lucía Rodríguez-Parada
Polymers 2021, 13(7), 1036; https://doi.org/10.3390/polym13071036 - 26 Mar 2021
Cited by 50 | Viewed by 5590
Abstract
Additive manufacturing technologies are shifting from rapid prototyping technologies to end use or final parts production. Polymeric material extrusion processes have been broadly addressed with a specific definition of all parameters and variables for all different of technologies approaches and materials. Recycled polymeric [...] Read more.
Additive manufacturing technologies are shifting from rapid prototyping technologies to end use or final parts production. Polymeric material extrusion processes have been broadly addressed with a specific definition of all parameters and variables for all different of technologies approaches and materials. Recycled polymeric materials have been studied due to the growing importance of the environmental awareness of the contemporary society. Beside this, little specific research has been found in product development applications for AM where the printed parts are in highly moisture environments or surrounded by water, but polymers have been for long used in such industries with conventional manufacturing approaches. This work focuses on the analysis and comparison of two different additively manufactured polymers printed by fused filament fabrication (FFF) processes using desktop-size printers to be applied for product design. The polymers used have been a recycled material: polyethylene terephthalate glycol (PETG) and polylactic acid (PLA). Degradation and water absorption behaviors of both materials are presented, analyzed and discussed in this paper, where different samples have been immersed in saturated solutions of water with maritime salt and sugar together with a control sample immersed in distilled water. The samples have been dimensionally and weight-controlled weekly as well as microscopically analyzed to understand degradation and absorption processes that appear in the fully saturated solutions. The results revealed how the absorption process is stabilized after a reduced number of weeks for both materials and how the degradation process is more remarked in the PLA material due to its organic nature. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Additive Manufacturing of Biopolymers and Their Applications)
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