Preliminary Study of Geometric Defects and Topography of Bio-Carriers Fabricated by the FDM Printing Process

The Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) process is one of the most widespread additive manufacturing technologies today. However, it still suffers from a great problem of anticipation of the quality of the manufactured product. Indeed, the quality of the output product is a key parameter in the acceptability of the end user. Many fields such as aeronautics, biomedical, food, pharmaceutical require many strict conditions for the acceptability of the product. In biological fields, and especially in the pharmaceutical field, the 3D printed product must meet the standards and requirements of the field to be accepted. In this context, our paper aims at analyzing the influence of some input parameters on the geometrical and topographical quality of samples dedicated to a biological application called bio-carrier. These bio-carriers are small structures used to capture phages when they are present at low titers. The 3D printed bio-carrier has also been used to enrich in vitro preparations for priming phage cultures to rapidly achieve high titers suitable for phage therapy applications. Phage therapy is used as a potential substitute for chemical antibacterial therapy. A Design Of Experience was adopted, in which the size, thickness and filling rate of the bio-carrier were chosen as input parameters. The analysis of this design showed that the sample size is the key parameter that can improve or reduce the geometric effect. Increasing the sample size can reduce the geometric defect. The sample topography is influenced by the fill rate which is the most important factor.