Biological features produced by additive manufacturing processes using vat photopolymerization method

Bio inspired surfaces have attracted great interest due to their potential applications in different industries by using a variety of structures. The fabrication of microstructures having complex shapes have been developed within the recent decades. This work realizes the direct fabrication of micro biological features by Additive Manufacturing (AM) processes.

The study characterizes the additive manufacturing processes for polymeric micro part productions using the vat photopolymerization method. A specifically designed vat photopolymerization AM machine suitable for precision printing at the micro dimensional scale has been developed, built and validated.

In order to evaluate the AM machine capability a Tokay gecko test part that contains microscale pillars with widened tips was used as benchmark sample. Two main printing parameters were selected for the study: exposure time and layer thickness. In order to select the optimal range of printing parameters, a sensitivity analysis was carried out prior to the final experiment.

The print quality was assessed in terms of features heights, tip heights and tip diameters.