The Construction of Biologically Relevant Fiber-Reinforced Hydrogel Geometries Using Air-Assisted Dual-Polarity...

Fiber-reinforced hydrogels are a class of soft composite materials that have seen increased use across a wide variety of biomedical applications. However, existing fabrication techniques for these hydrogels are unable to realize biologically relevant macro/mesoscale geometries. To address this limitation, this paper presents a novel air-assisted, dual-polarity electrospinning printhead that converges high-strength electric fields, with low velocity air flow to remove the collector dependency seen with traditional far-field electrospinning setups. The use of this printhead in conjunction with different configurations of deformable collection templates has resulted in the production of three classes of fiber-reinforced hydrogel prototype geometries, viz., (i) tubular geometries with bifurcations and mesoscale texturing; (ii) hollow, nontubular geometries with single and dual-entrances; and (iii) three-dimensional (3D) printed flat geometries with varying fiber density. All three classes of prototype geometries were mechanically characterized to have properties that were in line with those observed in living soft tissues. With the realization of this printhead, biologically relevant macro/mesoscale geometries can be realized using fiber-reinforced hydrogels to aid a wide array of biomedical applications.