Melt electrowriting stacked architectures with high aspect ratio

Melt electrowriting (MEW) approach with constant working distance has been developed to weaken the charge interferences and to enhance the architecture mechanical strength, by which various stacked architectures with high aspect ratio can be achieved. The deposited fiber guides the subsequent jet to print layer by layer along the pre-designed patterns without fiber pulsing. The position of the nozzle is raised simultaneously during the direct-writing process to maintain a constant working distance, and then, the deposition offset of the fiber layer can be decreased. The effects of the processing parameters on the MEW fibers with diameters distributed in the range of 50-125 mu m have been studied. Patterns of polygon and characters with fiber layer number of 200 and aspect ratio higher than 180 are direct-written accurately. The maximum height of the direct-written patterns reaches 9 mm. The proposed approach is a good method to realize the direct additive manufacturing of high-aspect-ratio architectures and to promote its industrial applications.