ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Manuf. Technol.
Sec. Additive Processes
Volume 5 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmtec.2025.1572842
Development of an End-to-End Automated Production Concept for Extrusion-based Additive Manufacturing of Personalized Medical Scaffolds
Provisionally accepted
- Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology (FHG), Aachen, Germany
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Personalized medical devices, especially scaffold-based implants, are increasingly important in medical care. One established manufacturing method for these products is extrusion-based 3D printing, also called 3D material extrusion (MEX) or extrusion additive manufacturing (EAM). According to the current state of the art, this technique lacks scalability, as many adjacent processes, such as material handling or quality control, are still carried out manually and no holistically automated solutions have been established. This work examines the extrusion-based 3D printing process for manufacturing cell-free porous scaffolds. Based on a literature review, relevant process parameters for MEX and quality attributes of polymer-based scaffolds are analyzed to derive functional requirements for holistically automating the manufacturing process. A concept for an end-to-end automated production infrastructure is developed, to allow efficient and scalable manufacture of scaffolds. All process parameters are analyzed for their influence on the quality attributes, and requirements are specified. Based on this, the development of the production concept is systematically carried out. The resulting technical system consists of a magnetic planar drive, which is used as an intralogistic transport system, but also forms the horizontal axis plane of the 3D printer. The resulting frictionless levitating print bed increases cleanroom suitability and enables the parallelization of print jobs and quality control steps for improved production flexibility and scalability. The central approaches of the concept are presented in a physical demonstrator. An initial proof of concept for planar drive-based MEX is provided and lays the foundation for further development and validation of the conceptualized production infrastructure.
Keywords: Personalized medical devices, scaffolds, 3D printing, Additive manufacturing, Automated production, scalable manufacturing, Process parameter, Quality attributes
Received: 07 Feb 2025; Accepted: 30 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Janning, König, Herbst, Nießing and Schmitt. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Kai Janning, Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology (FHG), Aachen, Germany
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.