Effect of modified salt leaching technique on the properties of bioactive glass reinforced polyurethane scaffold for biomedical application

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Date
2019-07
Authors
Ong Chia Chia
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In this study, modification of solvent casting/ particulate leaching (SCPL) technique was developed to investigate its influence on the properties of composite scaffolds. This modification was an enhanced SCPL method, which involved a conventional SCPL method combined with a step of centrifugation using different centrifugal speed of 1500rpm, 2000rpm, 2500rpm and 3000rpm to produce 45S5 bioactive glass (BG) reinforced polyurethane (PU) scaffold. The composite PU-BG scaffolds were fabricated with PU: BG mass ratio of 90:10. Five samples of PU-BG scaffolds with 52 wt. % hard segment content of PU were fabricated by SCPL method involving conventional SCPL and enhanced SCPL method with NaCl and NaHCO3 as the leaching agents to create pores in the scaffolds. The physical, structural, morphological and mechanical properties of the fabricated porous scaffolds were examined by different characterization techniques including Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (EDX), porosity test and compression test. Highly porous PU-BG scaffolds were obtained by enhanced SCPL method with porosity ranging from 88% to 90%, whereas 81% porosity was obtained by conventional SCPL method. Besides, high pore interconnectivity scaffolds with more macropores and micropores were observed when using enhanced SCPL method as compared with conventional SCPL method. In contrast, compression test showed that scaffolds fabricated by enhanced SCPL method had lower compressive strength ranging from 0.17 Mpa to 0.66 MPa as compared to conventional SCPL method with compressive strength of 0.90 MPa. This showed that there is correlation between porosity and mechanical properties of scaffold. All fabricated scaffolds in this xvii study had overall pore size of 96 μm to 460 μm which is suitable for bone regeneration application.
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