In order to be able to have soft and hard tissues of different organs, it is necessary to produce them some how that can be best for using in haptic and tele-operation environments. To do so, I want to know which material can be suitable to produce these tissues and can they be used simultaneously in one organ e.g. bone surrounded by muscles?
Hi Soroush,
With the Polyjet technology you can control the Shore hardness of the printed piece. Are the Tango materials ( http://www.stratasys.com/materials/polyjet/rubber-like ). If your budget can't afford that, there's also rubber materials for Reprap 3D printers with different hardness ( search Filaflex, or Ninjaflex )
You can also use FDM (Fused Deposition Modelling) also called FFF. The RP devices are much cheaper than anything else on the marked as there is a large open source community dedicated to this technology.
With this type of device you would need a polymer matrix with a low melting point, like Polycaprolactone (PCL) and use a filler like Hydroxyapatite (HAP) to get fully biocompatible and bio-absorbable 3d printed bone substitutes.
FDM can also be used with a modified extrusion head to deposit almost any slurry like material, so you could literally have an endless pool of candidate materials for soft tissue printing.
Hi Soroush,
what kind of 3D printer are you using? You could try using flexible PLA for soft tissue parts (e.g. https://spreadforms.com/product-category/flexible/ ) and regular PLA for hard tissue parts. I print lots of bone models and I like for example the following white PLA for this kind of task ( https://spreadforms.com/shop/1kg/pla-175-mm-1kg-white/ )
If you have a dual extruder you could maybe create both, bones and soft tissue layer simultaneously.
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