Work

Experimentally-informed in silico design of melt-electrowritten scaffolds for tissue engineering applications

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Melt electrowriting (MEW) has emerged as an advanced additive manufacturing (AM) technique for fabricating 3D scaffolds with tunable microscale architectures making it highly promising for tissue engineering applications. However, errors in fiber uniformity and placement, which frequently occur during the MEW process, can substantially affect the mechanical and biological performance of the scaffolds. To address this challenge, an experimentally informed finite element analysis was conducted on tubular MEW scaffolds designed for bone tissue engineering, investigating the effects of these MEW errors on scaffold behavior under three distinct loading regimes relevant to in silico conditions. The analysis revealed that finite element models over-predicted the stiffness of the scaffolds across all loading conditions. An error coefficient was introduced to quantify the discrepancies between the FE models and experiments. Further investigation using a submodeling approach identified that the reduction in stiffness was primarily due to failure of fusion of individual MEW strands, particularly where opposing helices intersected. This study presents an experimentally informed, versatile in silico pipeline that can be applied to optimize the design and mechanical performance of MEW scaffolds for a wide range of tissue engineering applications.

Source: Materials & Design

DOI: 10.1016/j.matdes.2025.114603