Design, Analysis, and Experiment of a Novel Ultrasonic Printing System

Ultrasonic-driven printing technology is widely used in bioprinting because of its high precision, good biocompatibility, and low cost. However, the conventional ultrasonic printing technology still has problems such as cross-contamination of bio-ink during storage, transportation, and processing, and cumbersome ink replacement process. Therefore, a new ultrasonic printing device is developed in this paper, which uses PZT plates as the driving element. And a fluid sub-system has been fabricated based on the self-made glass micro-nozzle, which is connected to the drive element using ultrasonic couplant gel. The separation of the fluid system and the drive system has been realized through the modular design, thereby realizing the rapid replacement of different inks and this relatively independent fluid system is of great benefit to better sealing and aseptic operation. In addition, a digital model is built to analyze its working mechanism. And an experimental system is established to characterize the performance of the device. The results show that the system can generate droplets stably and accurately, and the droplet volume can be controlled by the excitation voltage amplitude and pulse width.