Understanding and Engineering of Natural Surfaces with Additive Manufacturing

Benthic algae systems that attach to substrata have been shown effective in water pollution remediation and biomass production but yields are limited by attachment preferences in wild cultivars. This work seeks to uncover surface topography preferences for algal attachment by reproducing surface topographies with additive manufacturing. To date, no research effort has taken advantage of using additive manufacturing to reverse engineer the characteristics of the natural surfaces to find the attachment preferences of certain periphyton species towards substrata topography. Natural rocks and surfaces with attached biofilms were retrieved from streams and scanned with optical profilometry for surface parameter extraction and characterization. A material jetting process is used to additively manufacture the reversed surfaces followed by optical profilometry to validate the resultant topography. The results show that certain texture parameters (e.g. areal kurtosis) of surface impacts the biomass adhesion of specific algal communities.