Laser-assisted printing of alginate long tubes and annular constructs.

Laser-assisted printing such as laser-induced forward transfer has been well studied to pattern or fabricate two-dimensional constructs. In particular, laser printing has found increasing biomedical applications as an orifice-free cell and organ printing approach, especially for highly viscous biomaterials and biological materials. Unfortunately, there have been very few studies on the efficacy of three-dimensional printing performance of laser printing. This study has investigated the feasibility of laser tube printing and the effects of sodium alginate concentration and operating conditions such as the laser fluence and laser spot size on the printing quality during laser-assisted printing of alginate annular constructs (short tubes) with a nominal diameter of 3 mm. It is found that highly viscous materials such as alginate can be printed into well-defined long tubes and annular constructs. The tube wall thickness and tube outer diameter decrease with the sodium alginate concentration, while they first increase, then decrease and finally increase again with the laser fluence. The sodium alginate concentration dominates if the laser fluence is low, and the laser fluence dominates if the sodium alginate concentration is low.