Posts on 3D printing by photopolymerisation reach record number of citations

The paper titled A Review of Vat Photopolymerization Technology: Materials, Applications, Challenges, and Future Trends of 3D Printing, authored by a team from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, has achieved historical success in citation numbers. With over 500 citations in the Scopus database, this paper has become the most cited work affiliated with VSB-TUO, featuring original domestic authors, within four years.

In 2023, the manuscript was honoured with the BEST PAPER AWARD in the Review category by Polymers, an open access journal published by MDPI. In the Web of Science database, Polymers has an impact factor of 4.7 and is placed in the first quartile (Q1) and second decile (D2). The manuscript is also recognised as a Highly Cited Paper on Web of Science, indicating that it receives enough citations to rank among the top 1% of the most cited papers in the field of chemistry, based on the threshold for highly cited papers for the particular field and year of publication. VSB-TUO has only 41 such papers out of a total of more than 18,900 papers registered in the Web of Science database.

Photopolymerization in 3D printing has been used for applications in fabricating rapid and functional prototypes, customized products, and serial production. Over more than 30 years of development on photopolymerization has made great progress on improving the production methods (SLA, DLP, CDLP/CLIP), production speed, and quality of 3D printed products for industrial and research applications. Material-wise, efforts will further be paid to high-performance resins, especially biocompatible resins, and bioink.

“The future of photopolymerization lies in two main categories: material development, especially in medical applications, and applying modern designing methods,” says Marek Pagáč, the lead author from the Department of Machining, Assembly and Engineering Metrology. “Indeed, there is huge potential for material development and the mathematical modeling of 4D printing using multiphysical properties, i.e., variable surface hardness, shape memory, etc. The use of 3D printing, and specifically photopolymerisation, has expanded across numerous industries, including robotics, medicine, dentistry, engineering, automotive, aerospace, and water resources management,” Marek Pagáč concludes that the future of 3D printing is only limited by the creativity and technical innovation of designers, reflecting the paper’s inspiring and original concept.

This contribution was supported by the project Innovative and Additive Manufacturing Technologies – New Technological Solutions for 3D Printing of Metals and Composite Materials, r. no. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/17_049/0008407 from the Long-term Intersectoral Cooperation for ITI call. This project is also one of the most successful projects implemented in terms of number of citations (1646 citations excluding self-citations), published papers (134), and with an H-index of 21.

Full citation with title and authors: Pagac, M.; Hajnys, J.; Ma, Q.-P.; Jancar, L.; Jansa, J.; Stefek, P.; Mesicek, J. A Review of Vat Photopolymerization Technology: Materials, Applications, Challenges, and Future Trends of 3D Printing . Polymers 2021, 13, 598. https://doi.org/10.3390/polym13040598

Link to the manuscript

Manuscript in numbers:

Scopus citations – more than 500
Web of Science citations – more than 430
ResearchGate.com citations – more than 560
Google Scholar citations – more than 700
Number of readers – more than 32 thousand

Created: 1. 4. 2025

Category: News

Entered by: Administrator

Department: 9920 - Public Relations

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