If one wants to have arbitrarily shaped 3D cellular structures, additive manufacturing technology (AMT), also called Rapid Prototyping, is the method of choice. Different setups are commercially available that allow the printing of photopolymerizable formulations from a simple CAD model. Laser or DLP (Digital light processing)-based systems fabricate polymer parts with a feature resolution of about 10 µm. In recent days not only prototypes are of interest, also small number of individual parts that can be used in the automotive industry or for medical applications are important.

For the 3D printing process, the rather new two photon polymerization technique has also gained increasing interest during the last year. Especially the recently demonstrated significant increase in writing speed will make it nowadays interesting for translation into industrial processes.

More informtion on Additive Manufacturing Technologies can be found on the external website of Prof. Jürgen Stampfl's group: AMT

Material development is carried out in the field of photoinitiator synthesis, biocompatible Monomers for bone tissue engineering and blood vessel substitutes and polymerizable hydrogels.