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Creating Pluronic-GelMA ink 28%
Creating Pluronic-GelMA ink 28%
After creating my two 5mL cartridges of GelMA at 20% concentration, I heated up the cartridges to 35 degrees Celsius in a water bath. A water bath is essentially where you take a big container, fill it with water, then place the items in the water, and heat the water. This allows for the cartridges to stay in shape and not deform as they are plastic. Along with those cartridges, I heated up Pluronic 40% syringes as well. After this I transferred all of the ink into one big 50mL syringe and mixed the gels together. Then I transferred the mixture into induvial 5 mL syringes so that they would fit in the printer.
Procedure\Progress
Procedure\Progress
I began starting to print, however at the moment I have stopped printing as I am experiencing many difficulties. The printer which I am using requires for 3-D designs to be translated into "code". The different softwares I am using, however seem to not be agreeing and are not accepting the designs anymore. I have been working on fixing this issue as it has put me behind. It is mainly a lot of trouble shooting at the moment. I hope that the printer will soon take the designs again.
The photo that you see to the left is one example of what the code should look like after it has been translated. However, the method in which the designs and code are translated have to be precise as one mistake can cause an entire design to collapse and be not printable. Due to the type of printer which I am using, I am not able to directly give the computer a design to print. It has to "read" the code of the design.
Current issues and errors
Current issues and errors
The biggest issue as of now is the printer not accepting the printing design. I have been troubleshooting the software and installed a few others so I can translate the design through a new place. I may have to completely remake the design and translate it all over, which would push my data collecting further back. However, due to how expensive my materials are I would much rather wait and perfect the design so feasible data is collected. The other reason for perfecting the design is so that the data is more accurate. I can have bad prints, but those prints should bad on the base that it is the ink not having proper proprieties rather than a malfunction in printing.
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