AccScience Publishing / IJB / Online First / DOI: 10.36922/IJB025220222
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Early Access

Investigation on the humidity-driven swelling-shrinking behavior of filaments in material extrusion for medical biodegradable hydrogel

Kaicheng Yu1,3† Yifeng Yao1,3† Qiang Gao1,3* Le Xu1,3 Wei Zhang5 Min Zhu2 Peng Zhang1,3 Swee Leong Sing4* Lihua Lu1,3*
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1 School of Mechatronics Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China
2 School of Electrical Engineering and Automation, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China
3 Chongqing Research Institute of HIT, Chongqing 400000, China
4 Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore, 117575, Singapore
5 Key Laboratory of Data Analytics and Optimization for Smart Industry, Northeastern University, Shenyang, 110819, China
†These authors contributed equally to this work.
Received: 27 May 2025 | Accepted: 29 June 2025 | Published online: 30 June 2025
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in 3D Bioprinting)
© 2025 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )
Abstract

Materials extrusion with medical biodegradable hydrogel demonstrates the potential to manufacture biocompatible scaffolds in regenerative medicine. However, the unpredictable geometric change of fabricated models, such as swelling or shrinking, slower the development of complex hydrogel 3D architectures for in-vitro-functionalized tissues and organs. Inappropriate value of humidity throughout the 3D printing process is a primary reason of wrinkle or even collapse of proposed architectures. Therefore, there is a need to investigate the swelling-shrinking behavior with varying ambient humidity and to search for the appropriate value of humidity in hydrogel printing process. This study established a thermal-humidity-multiphase flow coupling field simulation model for investigating the humidity-driven swelling-shrinking behavior of hydrogel filaments numerically. Subsequently, the appropriate value of 3D printing humidity for hydrogel filaments with diameters of 0.2 mm, 0.3 mm, and 0.4 mm were explored, which were respectively set to 90%, 80%, and 60%. Furthermore, groups of structures were fabricated with the selected humidity, which demonstrated a moderated moisture loss of 3D architecture. A human ear model was successfully manufactured, of which the effective size reached 20 mm(length) × 10 mm (width) × 10 mm(height).

Keywords
Humidity control
3D printing
Medical hydrogel
Coupling field simulation
Funding
The authors deeply acknowledge the fanatical support from the key research and development Plan project of Heilongjiang Province [grand No. 2022ZX02C22]; the science and technology innovation talent project on manufacturing industry of Harbin, [grand No. 2023HBRCGD011, 2022CXRCGD029]; the Interdisciplinary Research Foundation of HIT [grand No. IR2021223]; the Sponsored by Natural Science Foundation of Chongqing [grand No. CSTB2023NSCQ-MSX0822].
Conflict of interest
Authors declare they have no competing interests.
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International Journal of Bioprinting, Electronic ISSN: 2424-8002 Print ISSN: 2424-7723, Published by AccScience Publishing