Controlling Light in Scattering Materials for Volumetric Additive Manufacturing

3D printing has revolutionized the manufacturing of volumetric components and structures in many areas. Several fully volumetric light-based techniques have been recently developed thanks to the advent of photocurable resins, promising to reach unprecedented short print time (down to a few tens of seconds) while keeping a good resolution (around 100 mu m). However, these new approaches only work with homogeneous and relatively transparent resins so that the light patterns used for photo-polymerization are not scrambled along their propagation. Herein, a method that takes into account light scattering in the resin prior to computing projection patterns is proposed. Using a tomographic volumetric printer, it is experimentally demonstrated that implementation of this correction is critical when printing objects whose size exceeds the scattering mean free path. To show the broad applicability of the technique, functional objects of high print fidelity are fabricated in hard organic scattering acrylates and soft cell-laden hydrogels (at 4 million cells mL(-1)). This opens up promising perspectives in printing inside turbid materials with particular interesting applications for bioprinting cell-laden constructs.