Influence of 3D-printing conditions on physical properties of hydrogel objects

In this paper, we present the relationship between printing parameters of a 3D gel printer Soft and Wet Intelligent Matter-Easy Realizer (SWIM-ER) and mechanical properties of the fabricated gel objects by SWIM-ER. The printer is able to fabricate hydrogel objects by scanning of ultra-violet (UV) light irradiation (photo-polymerization). Various hydrogels objects were printed with different scanning velocity of UV light. We measured the water content and mesh sizes of gel objects utilizing Scanning Microscopic Light Scattering (SMILS). Furthermore, we also printed the gel objects with multiple scan rates with constant UV light irradiation energy, and measured sizes of gel objects, and performed the compression test. It was observed that the physical properties of printed hydrogel objects are strongly related with 3D printing parameters (scan velocity and number of scans-scan rate) due to difference in crosslinking density of polymer network.