PRESS RELEASE – MULTISTATION PRESENTS BIOCERAWAX®

Examples of bioceramics produced with the Biocerawax® process: Phase: calcium phosphate, hydroxyapatite Ca10(PO4)6(OH)2

Until now, bioceramics, such as calcium phosphates (CaP), have been mainly produced with traditional ceramic processes (e.g. porogen leaching, phase separation, gas foaming, replication of PMMA template, bone machining). These conventional methods suffer from architectural limitations, internal inhomogeneity and sample-to-sample variations. This lack of architectural standardization prevents the rigorous design of biological experiments, as well as their reproducibility.

New engineering developments combining computational methods and additive manufacturing (AM) technologies, like SLA or SLM, are able to overcome such limitations by providing a higher level of control over the design of manufactured scaffolds with the opportunity to create optimized custom architectures in a reproducible way. However, these laser beam technologies have still major drawbacks:

– lack of flexibility from one bioceramic phase composition to another,

– changes in the chemical and phase compositions (especially for CaP),

– post-processing issues (e.g. removal of raw materials and supports),

– and their cost.

MULTISTATION announces Biocerawax®, a new manufacturing process for bioceramics (Alumina, zirconia, CaP, etc.). Developed by the EMSE (Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne, France), this process produces complex and lattice architectures, by impregnation of lost patterns manufactured with Solidscape machine (DoD® process).

Dr David MARCHAT of EMSE confirms the main advantages of this process:

– preserve phase biocompatibility (no toxic residue, do not induce phase modification),

– allow for reproducible and precise manufacturing of a wide panel of custom architectures (e.g. up to only 5 µm wide and high cusps for channels of 150µm),

– cheaper than technologies using a laser beam or e-beam as the power source (SLS, SLM).

Some models made in calcium phosphate, hydroxyapatite Ca10(PO4)6(OH)2 will be presented on the booth of Multistation (Hall 3-1 booth G89) at FORMNEXT Frankfurt 17-20 November 2015.