Effects of pressure and height on printability for soft materials

Abstract Extrusion-based printing with soft materials is an additive manufacturing technology, which is widely used in biomedical fields such as skin reconstruction, muscle repair, and cartilage regeneration, etc. Constructing high-precision printed structures and maintaining high cellular bioactivity are key issues in the in vitro construction of tissues and organs using extrusion bioprinting. There are some printing paraments such as pressure, height, nozzle type (eg, length and inner diameter), translational speed, etc . can have a huge influence on the structural fidelity. In this work, we put forward a quantitative test method to evaluate the printing accuracy is influenced by pressure and height. The results show that higher pressure can benefit uniformity (the filament width is equal everywhere), and higher height leads to higher uniformity only in low pressure for paste. This study can provide researchers with the tunning suggestions of printing paraments, which may promote the development of printing accuracy in the future.