Suspensions of gel particles which are pourable or spoonable at room temperature can be created by shearing a gelling biopolymer through its gelation (thermal or ion mediated) rather than allowing quiescent cooling – thus the term ‘fluid gel’ may be used to describe the resulting material. As agar gelation is thermoreversible this type of fluid gel is able to be heated again to melt agar gel particles to varying degrees then re-form a network quiescently upon cooling, whose strength depends on the temperature of re-heating, determining the amount of agar solubilised and subsequently able to partake in re-gelation. Using this principle, for the first time fluid gels have been applied to a high viscosity 3D printing process wherein the printing temperature (at the nozzle) is controllable. This allows the use of ambient temperature feedstocks and by altering the nozzle temperature, the internal nature (presence or absence of gel particles) and gel strength of printed droplets differs. If the nozzle prints at different temperatures for each layer a structure with modulated texture could be created.

中文翻译：

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流体凝胶：用于高粘度喷射的新型原料。

可以通过在凝胶中剪切凝胶生物聚合物（通过热或离子介导的方法）而不是使其静态冷却来剪切在室温下可倾倒或倾倒的凝胶颗粒，因此可以使用“流体凝胶”一词来描述所得材料。 。由于琼脂凝胶化是热可逆的，因此可以再次加热这种类型的液体凝胶以将琼脂凝胶颗粒熔融至不同程度，然后在冷却后静态地重新形成网络，其强度取决于重新加热的温度，从而确定琼脂的量溶解并随后能够参与重新胶凝。利用这一原理，流体凝胶首次被应用于高粘度3D打印过程，其中打印温度（在喷嘴处）是可控制的。这允许使用环境温度的原料，并且通过改变喷嘴温度，印刷液滴的内部性质（存在或不存在凝胶颗粒）和凝胶强度是不同的。如果喷嘴在每一层以不同的温度打印，则可以创建具有调制纹理的结构。