Multi-scale manufacture for bio-inspired structure enabled by variable voxel stereolithography

In our work, the new stereolithography technology has been used to construct 3D shark skin teeth with both high resolution and high throughput. In this way complex structures more closely mimicking real shark skin textures have been fabricated (Figure 3-4). Cylinder pipe (at the same size) with and without interior shark skin textures were printed and used to study the effects of the texture in pipe flow. The pressure gradient across shark skin pipe section are measured by existing wet-wet differential pressure transducers. Then this pressure drop measurement can be translated into a friction coefficient by using standard Darcy-Weisbach law. A schematic of the pressure drop measurement setup is shown in Figure 5 and future detailed data analysis will be presented.