Experimentally-informed in silico design of melt-electrowritten scaffolds for tissue engineering applications

Abstract

Melt electrowriting (MEW) has emerged as an advanced additive manufacturing (AM) technique for fabricating 3D scaffolds with tunable microscale architectures making it highly promising for tissue engineering applications. However, errors in fiber uniformity and placement, which frequently occur during the MEW process, can substantially affect the mechanical and biological performance of the scaffolds. To address this challenge, this study performed an experimentally-informed finite element analysis on tubular MEW scaffolds designed for bone tissue engineering. To quantify the discrepancies between the finite element (FE) models and experiments, the ratio of numerical to experimental scaffold stiffness, called the error coefficient, was calculated. The error coefficient for lateral compression (25% lateral strain), three point bending (12% flexural strain) and uniaxial tension (20% tensile strain) were observed to be 1.15, 14.57 and 8.5 respectively. Further investigation, using a submodeling approach and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images, identified that the reduction in stiffness in experiments was primarily due to failure of fusion of individual MEW strands, particularly where opposing helices intersected. This study presents an experimentally informed, versatile in silico pipeline that can be applied to optimize the design and mechanical performance of MEW scaffolds for a wide range of tissue engineering applications. © 2025 The Author(s)