Section for metallic 3D-printing at the Laboratory for Biomaterials and Bioengineering at U. Laval

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Advanced materials, showing unconventional and extreme properties are becoming the key factors for generating and pushing innovation in a number of fields, including biomedical, industrial, chemical, mechanical, pharmaceutical, and optical thus guaranteeing competitiveness and impacting the economic growth. One of the most recent, versatile and high-potential material processing techniques is without any doubt additive manufacturing. Selective laser melting or atomic diffusion additive manufacturing constitute two innovative routes for fabricating specimens with tailored composition making possible to generate compositional gradients into the same specimens. Within this technique, it is potentially possible to confer new features such as higher resistance or biological attractiveness towards selected cells, to a wide range of substrates, in a non-homogenous way, all over the specimen geometry. ***The additive metal manufacturing system we propose to acquire by this proposal to NSERC, is an easy-to-use equipment that is fast becoming the gold standard in academic laboratories that require rapid design-to-production of metallic specimens for developing new alloys and modulating their properties after post-fabrication thermomechanical treatments. The idea is to explore the potential of additively manufacturing new degradable metallic alloys for medical applications. The urgent clinical need for temporary devices that fulfill their mission and then degrade without generating toxic reactions into the body fully justify this research. Pediatric congenital diseases, neurological precise releasing of medicaments, hands and maxilla-facial surgery, some orthopedic defects treatments, most of the cardiac stenting procedures, and others will greatly benefit from the development of a new class of advanced manufactured materials with tailored gradients. Within the coPIs, the potential of fabricating new metallic alloys by casting, forming, electroforming and powder metallurgy has already been investigated. Results clearly show that the process strongly affect the degradation rate. The elaboration of new metallic degradable metals with targetable degradation rate constitute today the main challenge in the field. This will allow to develop personalized devices for each patient and depending from his/her pathology and envisaged clinical treatment. This will strongly help the proposed team to competitively show the value of their fundamental research works on materials for health. ***This equipment is expected to boost the application of the results of the coPIs discovery researches toward innovation thus valorizing the output of the researches and exploring the potential to become true products for the benefit of the Society.