Fabricating petri dishes with built-in conductive pads via 3D printing

• Main Author: Mao, Yuxian
• Other Authors: Yeong Wai Yee
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2024
• Subjects: Engineering; Mechanical engineering; FDM
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/177274
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Petri Dish is an indispensable piece of equipment used when an experiment related to electrical stimulation (ES) of cells is conducted due to its transparency properties. However the setup for ES of cells consists of many wirings thus, this project aims to reduce the complexity of the setup by creating a conductive petri dish using Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM). FDM was selected due to its versatility and customizability for multi-material printing. Printing parameters in FDM are crucial to obtaining a good quality print. The results obtained in the optimization experiment show that a higher nozzle temperature, lower printing speed, and higher flow rate yield prints with optical transparency for the PETG filament. It was also observed that higher nozzle temperature leads to an increase in oozing/stringing of the Conductive PLA filament. Functional testing of the conductive petri dish shows that cell is successfully cultured on the conductive petri dish indicating the potential of replacing conventional petri dish with conductive petri dish.