Speaker
Description
Biofabrication increasingly demands creative strategies to fabricate structured and functional constructs that can meet healthcare challenges. Chaotic printing and bioprinting offer a unique and accessible way to build internal complexity in materials, leveraging the deterministic behavior of laminar flows.
Our journey began with a miniaturized journal bearing system, where controlled chaotic advection allowed fine structuring of hydrogel filaments without the need for nozzle miniaturization. We then expanded these principles into continuous chaotic printing systems based on static mixers, enabling the fabrication of hydrogel filaments with multilayered internal architectures—achieving layer resolutions below 10 μm inside millimetric constructs.
Importantly, in this context, "chaotic" does not imply randomness or turbulence. Originally used in chemical engineering to enhance mixing efficiency under laminar conditions, chaotic flows are here repurposed to organize materials with precision. This reinterpretation opens new opportunities: from fabricating prevascularized skeletal muscle-like tissues and complex tumor microenvironments, to engineering multicellular bacterial ecosystems and functional food scaffolds.
By embracing the inherent dynamics of chaotic flows, we propose a simple, versatile, and reproducible approach to create physiologically relevant architectures. This strategy holds great promise to expand the accessibility of biofabrication and to accelerate healthcare innovation through the fabrication of next-generation tissues, disease models, and therapeutic platforms.
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