Biological, Biomedical and Chemistry Applications

For the most part, very small microfluidic devices can be expected to be made by stencil microlithography and molecular self-assembly techniques, but additive fabrication is likely to act in a strong supplementary role to fabricate packaging and other mesoscale features. It can also be expected that many other technologies will be combined with additive fabrication to form complex systems. For example, microcombustor and thermoelectric microgenerator power sources made by electrochemical fabrication (EFAB) may be incorporated into MEMS devices fabricated using other technologies.

The direct fabrication of bio-devices through additive fabrication is also being pursued. The US Navy is using a direct write technology, laser induced forward transfer (LIFT), to make microarrays of biomaterial. The technique yields thick layers of DNA, RNA, proteins, tissues, nutrients, etc. Similar approaches are being used to fabricate scaffold structures for tissue engineering applications which are described further in that section.

Equipment
Many components that are used to handle biological fluids or for chemical processing can be made more efficient by the use of geometrically complex structures. Such devices have applications in biotechnology and also in the industrial manufacture of certain chemicals and polymers. RM offers a way to provide the design freedom to allow these new, complicated shapes to be made economically. For example, static micro-mixers based on fractal geometry produce rapid, homogeneous mixing. Complex photocatalytic devices for purification and disinfection of fluids are said to be very efficient, and similar structures can be used as substrates for catalysts.