On Friday, September 28, 2012 5:22:22 AM UTC-7, phillyj wrote:
On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 3:43 AM, Patrik D'haeseleer <pat...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Have you tried just printing with food coloring in water? That is the first
> thing we did, and that worked fine. One problem you may be having with a gel
> is that the inkjet head expects a fluid of a certain viscosity. Plus as the
> thermal inkjet vaporizes some of the ink, some gelatin may burn and
> eventually clog the print head.
>
Just an idea, but is it possible to have 2 liquid substances that
solidify outside the print head? Or 2 substances of enough viscosity
that they don't clog the print heads but at a certain temperature and
in contact with each other, they solidify?
We thought of doing the old CaCl + sodium alginate trick used for spherification in molecular gastronomy. Seems like there's some interesting cell and enzyme immobilization tricks you can do with alginate. I haven't really looked into this yet, but there might be some creative new applications along those lines, once you add a printer into the mix as well.
If you're thinking of printing with something that has a significantly higher viscosity than water, you really should consider a syringe pump instead of an inkjet print head though. That also seems to be the approach most of the research in organ printing is heading. Partly because it just allows you to put down a lot more volume, so you don't wind up having to take hours and hours to print an organ using pico-liter droplets.
I tell people that inkjet technology theoretically allows you to put down different cell types precisely where you want them to be in 3D. But in reality, you probably don't even *want* that high level of precision. Probably better to deposit a big glob of cells, and let them reorganize themselves into the right patterns.
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