Multidimensional Mechanics of Three-Dimensional Printed and Micro-Architectured Scaffolds.

Mechanical properties of porous materials depend on their micro-architectural characteristics. Freeze casting is an effective method to fabricate micro-architectured porous scaffolds. Three key characteristics generated during freeze casting are wall thickness, number of domains at the cross-section, and transverse bridges connecting adjacent walls. To specifically study the effect of these structural characteristics on the mechanics and anisotropic compressive properties of scaffolds, we utilize additive manufacturing, i.e., 3D printing, to fabricate strictly designed cubic scaffolds with varying one characteristic at a time. We then compare strength, toughness, resilience, stiffness, and strain to failure in three orthogonal directions of the scaffolds, including longitudinal and transverse directions. To compare these multidimensional mechanics in a single diagram, we use a previously developed radar chart method to evaluate different scaffolds and unravel the effect of the structural characteristics. We find that the multidimensional mechanics can be effectively tuned by the micro-architectural characteristics. Notably, the buckling resistance of the scaffolds depends on all three structural characteristics. Our results show that an increased number of domains leads to enhanced toughness in all three directions. Increasing wall thickness leads to enhanced mechanical properties but comes at the price of losing small-sized pores, which is not favored for certain applications. In addition, adding transverse bridges increase not only the transverse strength of the scaffolds but also the longitudinal strength as they also enhance the buckling resistance. Our study provides important insights into the structure-property relationships of 3D-printed micro-architectured porous scaffolds.

New paradigms in hierarchical porous scaffold design for tissue engineering.

This paper presented an effective method for the three-dimensional (3D) hierarchical porous scaffold design for tissue engineering. To achieve such a hierarchical porous structure with accurately controlled internal pore architectures, the recursive intersection Boolean operation (RIBO) was proposed in order to satisfy computational efficiency and biological function requirements of a porous scaffold. After generating the distance field (DF) for the given anatomic model and required pore architectures, the recursive DF modifications enable us to design hierarchical porous scaffolds with complex combinations of pore morphologies. A variety of experimental results showed that the proposed hierarchical porous scaffold design method has the potential benefits for accurately controlling both the porosity and the pore architecture gradients while preserving the advantages of triply periodic minimal surface pore geometries.