Adhesion of PJM-printed MED610 objects on textile substrates

Three-dimensional printing on textile fabrics was first suggested around 10 years ago, leading to an increasing amount of research on this topic. While first approaches aimed at offering new design possibilities, the mechanical properties that can be achieved by these polymer/textile composites are more the focus of recent investigations. For such technical applications, adhesion between both parts of the composite is crucial. While most studies have concentrated on fused deposition modeling (FDM) on textile fabrics so far, the adhesion of these polymers on textiles is still problematic. For this reason, recently, resin-based 3D printing on textile fabrics has been investigated. The possibility to print on textiles by stereolithography (SLA) was already shown a few years ago and has been further investigated since. PolyJet modeling (PJM) was reported as another method for direct printing on textiles only recently. This presentation shows the first study of PJM printing on different fabrics with the medical resin MED610. While a high textile surface roughness increases the printed material’s adhesion, high hydrophobicity reduces it. In addition, first experiments on the impact of different textile substrates on the porosity of the MED610 surface are reported, which may support the tailoring of the porosity for the composites’ potential use in tissue engineering and similar biotechnological applications.