The Southwest Reasearch Institute is using 3D printing to more efficiently grow billions of cells! By 3D printing bioreactor scaffolds, they are able to create unique geometries with larger surface areas leading to more cell growth. One drawback to this method is that it generates extremely large file sizes. Implicit modeling offers a potential solution.

One of the next frontiers in medicine is to treat diseases not through chemistry but through biology, using cells engineered to fight the disease. But it takes a lot of cells to accomplish this, and therefore a lot of surface area for the cells to grow on. Industrializing bioengineering demands space-efficient means to cultivate cells, entailing a surface-area challenge even greater than, say, the surface-area needs of improved heat exchangers. One organization at the forefront of this work is the Southwest Research Institute, which has developed a bioreactor employing a geometrically complex cell-growth scaffold only possible through 3D printing. The geometry is so complex, the computer processing challenges of modeling the digital file pose an obstacle to scaling up the cell-growth hardware. A segment of this episode with Metafold discusses implicit modeling as a potential alternative for mathematically defining the most complex 3D printed geometries.

This episode of The Cool Parts Show brought to you by Carpenter Additive. https://www.carpenteradditive.com/

FOR ALL ACCESS MEMBERS: Metafold CEO Elissa Ross goes on to describe another promising win that will come from more effective modeling of geometrically complex 3D printed forms: metamaterials. To what extent can material “properties” come from geometry rather than the material itself?The Cool Parts Show All Access is a free subscription for fans of the show. Sign up and watch this month's exclusive Extra here: https://www.additivemanufacturing.med...

LEARN MORE ABOUT:

The Southwest Research Institute
https://www.swri.org/

Implicit Modeling
https://www.additivemanufacturing.med...

Metafold
https://www.metafold3d.com/

Geometrically complex heat exchanger made through 3D printing
   • 3D Printed Heat Exchangers  

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00:00 3D Printing for Bioreactors and Regenerative Medicine
00:52 Bioreactor Scaffolds for Growing Stem Cells
01:57 How Growing Cells Works and What are the Challenges
05:50 3D Printing Provides a Solution
07:49 The Challenge with Creating 3D Printed Scaffolds
10:57 Industrial Scale Cell Growth
13:41 Summary of 3D Printed Bioreactor Scaffolds
14:25 Why Scaling Up is so Difficult
16:24 How Implicit Modeling Works
17:46 How Implicit Modeling Could Solve this Challenge
19:44 How is Metal Powder for 3D Printing Made?

#3dprinting #manufacturing #bioengineergaming