In this weekend’s 3D Printing News Briefs, UK-based 3D printing bureau 3D People responds to global instability, and AEWIN chose Fabric8Labs’ technology for advanced thermal management solutions. We’ll end with research, as TU Wien developed a method to 3D print artificial blood vessels for organ-on-a-chip devices. Read on for all the details!
3D People’s PartsVault is Practical Response to Global Instability
Recently, UK-based 3D printing bureau 3D People launched PartsVault, a digital inventory platform that enables local, on-demand production of plastic parts to help businesses maintain uninterrupted operations. The company says that since the launch, this platform is being quickly and widely adopted by UK and international companies, which is indicative of a need for more resilient and flexible supply chains during this time of geopolitical instability and business uncertainty. With the continuing war in Ukraine, an unstable economic climate, and Trump-era tariffs, traditional supply chains are under extreme pressure, so it’s no wonder that a digital inventory sounds like a great idea. Rather than storing physical inventory, PartsVault lets customers store their up-to-date part files in the cloud, save the production settings, and trigger production at its ISO 9001-certified facility only when needed. Virtual inventories like this one have become important tools in improving responsiveness, lowering risk, and moving away from the outdated models of overproduction and stockpiling parts.
“Traditional stockpiling strategies are struggling to hold up in the current geopolitical climate. PartsVault™ lets manufacturers keep control without tying up capital or taking unnecessary risks. We’ve seen first-hand how on-demand production can shift the balance in favour of speed, flexibility, and smarter decision-making,” said Felix Manley, Co-Founder of 3D People.
AEWIN Chooses Fabric8Labs’ ECAM Technology for Thermal Management
Fabric8Labs’ ECAM enables high-resolution, customized designs.
Fabric8Labs, Inc. recently announced that its novel Electrochemical Additive Manufacturing (ECAM) technology was chosen by AEWIN Technologies, which provides high-performance network platforms. AEWIN plans to use ECAM to produce advanced thermal management solutions for next-gen Edge AI systems, which bring artificial intelligence capabilities directly to devices at the edge of a network, like sensors, smartphones, or IoT devices. Through its high-resolution pure copper AM capabilities, ECAM will make it possible to produce more efficient, cutting-edge, customized 3D cooling structures and heat sinks. Fabric8Labs’ proprietary technology also increases the surface area of 3D micro-mesh designs by over 900%, so AEWIN can make 3D micro-mesh boiler plates that show thermal improvements greater than 1.3 °C/100W, in comparison to other high-quality alternatives. Plus, AEWIN’s platforms are built for both PFAS and PFAS-free coolants, and using ECAM-enabled boiler plates will enable PUEs that are lower than 1.02.
“The exponential growth of data and Edge AI complexity requires the most advanced on-premises computing,” said Dr. Ce Liu, Director of the Advanced Technical Development Division at AEWIN Technologies. “Through our advanced system-level design, we are able to leverage Fabric8Labs’ ECAM technology to optimize solutions for high efficiency, power usage effectiveness, and reduced total cost of ownership.”
3D Printing Artificial Blood Vessels in Miniature Organ Models
Schematic representation of a hepatic lobule (left) and 3D view of the vascularized hepatic lobule on-chip after 9 days of culture (right)
In biomedical research, organs-on-a-chip are becoming ever more important for accuracy in experiments. Unfortunately, these miniature organs lack blood vessels and capillaries, which means meaningful comparisons with living organisms can’t be made. But a research team at TU Wien in Austria created a method to rapidly and reliably print tiny blood vessels, and studies show that they behave just like the vessels in living tissue. In an ideal scenario, these need to be created directly within hydrogels for structural support, in order to guide the formation of the endothelial cells that line the inside of human blood vessels. Until now, it’s been difficult to control the size and shape of these microvascular networks, and thus run reproducible experiments. But the TU Wien team is using ultrashort laser pulses in the femtosecond range to write very precise 3D structures directly into the hydrogel. Additionally, to form the artificial vessels quickly and keep them structurally stable once populated with living cells, they used a two-step thermal curing process to alter the network’s structure and produce a more stable material. They also showed that the 3D printed artificial tissues behave just like their natural counterparts by collaborating with Keio University in Japan to successfully create a liver-lobule-on-a-chip that incorporates a controlled 3D vascular network.
“We have not only shown that we can produce artificial blood vessels that can actually be perfused. The even more important thing is: We have developed a scalable technology that can be used on an industrial scale. It takes only 10 minutes to pattern 30 channels, which is at least 60 times faster than other techniques,” said Prof. Aleksandr Ovsianikov, who established TU Wien’s Research Group 3D Printing and Biofabrication.
“Replicating the liver’s dense and intricate microvasculature has long been a challenge in organ-on-chip research. By building multiple layers of microvessels spanning the entire tissue volume, we were able to ensure adequate nutrient and oxygen supply — which, in turn, led to improved metabolic activity in the liver model,” said Keio University’s Masafumi Watanabe. “We believe that these advancements bring us a step closer to integrating Organ-on-a-chip technology into preclinical drug discovery.”
To learn more about the liver tissue experiments by TU Wien and Keio University, you can read their paper here.
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