Requirements and Evaluation of Commercial Digital Light Processing 3D Printers for Upscaled Production of Microstructured Tissue Culture Devices

Culture devices for human tissue models may revolutionize the drug development process. Industrial impact relies on the success of converting prototypes to mass‐producible devices. Large scale production of the required microscale geometries over large areas is challenging using conventional manufacturing schemes. Here, the manufacturing requirements are outlined for industrial‐scale 3D printing and present a framework for quantitative evaluation of digital light processing (DLP) 3D printers to facilitate production upscaling and standardization. Printed stress test designs with micropillars, microwells, and reentrant structures typical of culture devices are obtained from printer manufacturers and analyzed using optical microscopy and optical coherence tomography. The printability limit as a quantitative performance metric based on the microstructural fidelity over large areas is described. Thorough dimensional analysis of the prints reveals characteristic structural deviations from the design. The feature quality is found to be homogeneous across the build area for all systems above a critical characteristic lateral length scale. The analysis also shows that printing largely flat designs with abruptly changing cross‐section can be challenging due to squeeze‐flow resistance of the resin. By carefully defining the specific use‐case, the presented performance metrics can support commercialization of microstructured tissue culture devices.