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. 2018 Mar 31;4(2):133.
doi: 10.18063/IJB.v4i2.133. eCollection 2018.

A multi-scale porous scaffold fabricated by a combined additive manufacturing and chemical etching process for bone tissue engineering

Cijun Shuai  1   2 , Youwen Yang  1   2 , Pei Feng  1 , Shuping Peng  3 , Wang Guo  1 , Anjie Min  4 , Chengde Gao  1
Affiliations

A multi-scale porous scaffold fabricated by a combined additive manufacturing and chemical etching process for bone tissue engineering

Cijun Shuai et al. Int J Bioprint. .

Abstract

It is critical to develop a fabrication technology for precisely controlling an interconnected porous structure of scaffolds to mimic the native bone microenvironment. In this work, a novel combined process of additive manufacturing (AM) and chemical etching was developed to fabricate graphene oxide/poly(L-lactic acid) (GO/PLLA) scaffolds with multiscale porous structure. Specially, AM was used to fabricate an interconnected porous network with pore sizes of hundreds of microns. And the chemical etching in sodium hydroxide solution constructed pores with several microns or even smaller on scaffolds surface. The degradation period of the scaffolds was adjustable via controlling the size and quantity of pores. Moreover, the scaffolds exhibited surprising bioactivity after chemical etching, which was ascribed to the formed polar groups on scaffolds surfaces. Furthermore, GO improved the mechanical strength of the scaffolds.

Keywords: PLLA; additive manufacturing; chemical etching; multi-scale pores; scaffolds.

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Conflict of interest statement

No conflict of interest was reported by the authors. The authors gratefully acknowledge the following projects and funds for the financial support: (1) The Natural Science Foundation of China (51575537, 81572577, 51705540); (2) Hunan Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (2016JJ1027); (3) The Project of Innovation-driven Plan of Central South University (2016CX023); (4) The Open-End Fund for the Valuable and Precision Instruments of Central South University; (5) The fund of the State Key Laboratory of Solidification Processing at NWPU (SKLSP201605); (6) The Project of State Key Laboratory of High Performance Complex Manufacturing, Central South University; (7) National Postdoctoral Program for Innovative Talents (BX201700291); (8) The Project of Hunan Provincial Science and Technology Plan (2017RS3008) and (9) The Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of Central South University (2016zzts046).

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
The fabrication process of multi-scale porous scaffolds. (A) powder preparation, (B) porous scaffolds with macro pores by AM and (C) micro pores on scaffolds surface by chemical etching.
Figure 2
Figure 2
FE-SEM characterization of the multi-scale porous scaffolds: (a) interconnected porous network by AM, (b) Low- and (c) highmagnification images of porous surface structure by chemical etching for different etching time.
Figure 3
Figure 3
XRD analysis of the phase composition of the scaffolds with and without chemical etching.
Figure 4
Figure 4
(a) Representative stress-strain curves and (b) compressive strength of the scaffolds under compression tests. Asterisks denote significant difference with p < 0.05, as compared with PLLA-0 scaffold. n = 5. The typical surface microstructure of (c) GO/PLLA scaffold and (d) GO/PLLA-1.0 scaffold.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Relationship between the hardness of scaffolds and etching time. Asterisks denote significant difference with p < 0.05, as compared with PLLA-0 scaffold. n = 5.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Weight loss of the multi-scale porous scaffolds in SBF solution. Error bars represent the standard deviation. n = 3.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Surface morphology and corresponding EDS results of multi-scale porous scaffolds after immersion in SBF for 5 weeks.
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