Developing Melt Electrowriting on an Open-Source Fused Filament Fabrication Platform

Melt electrowriting (MEW) is an additive manufacturing technology where a fiber is deposited in a precise way with the help of an electric field to build micrometric designs for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine (TERM). The commercially available MEW systems currently are expensive and require fine tuning to match the scaffold quality of custom built systems and, as a result, many of the research institutions choose to opt for the latter. This thesis presents a way to reduce the cost of MEW systems by using an open source Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) printer, converting it into a MEW system to make good quality high-resolution scaffolds. The printer needs additional parts such as a high voltage power supply (HVPS) and different components for high voltage and flow rate control. The resulting scaffold produced by the filament feed MEW system is shown to have good stacking and good dimensional accuracy of the fibers, which was close to the calculated values.