Journal of Inorganic Materials ›› 2015, Vol. 30 ›› Issue (1): 71-76.DOI: 10.15541/jim20140204

• Orginal Article • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Interconnectivity of Bioceramic Scaffolds with Different Porous Structures and Their Fluid Velocity Distribution Analyzed by Micro-CT Computer Modeling

LUO Pin-Feng1,2, ZHI Wei1, ZHANG Jing-Wei1, SHI Feng1, DUAN Ke1,2, WANG Jian-xin1, LU Xiong1, WENG Jie1   

  1. (1. Key Laboratory of Advanced Technologies of Materials, Ministry of Education, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu 610031, China; 2. Jiangsu Provincial Key Laboratory for Interventional Medical Devices, Huaiyin Institute of Technology Huaiyin 223003, China)
  • Received:2014-04-16 Revised:2014-06-03 Published:2015-01-20 Online:2014-12-29
  • About author:LUO Pin-Feng. E-mail: hack1024@163.com
  • Supported by:
    National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program, 2012CB933600);National Nature Science Foundation of China (51172188);Science and Technology Pillar Project of Sichuan (2010FZ0048)

Abstract:

Pore interconnectivity is a key parameter for bone tissue engineering scaffolds, which controls penetration of body fluid with proteins and cells, and tissue ingrowth. The present study investigated the porous characteristics of hydroxyapatite (HA) scaffolds prepared via three processes (HA sphere packing, wax sphere-leaching and HA fiber aggregation) by micro-computed tomography (μCT) from following three procedures: (1) modeling of the porous structure by image reconstruction; (2) analysis of porosity along longitudinal direction; and (3) simulation of fluid flow across the scaffold by finite element analysis (FEA). Image analyses revealed that, the scaffolds prepared by the above two methods featured relatively regular porosity distributions, whereas that by HA fiber aggregation had an irregular distribution. Fluid velocity distribution by FEA suggested that scaffolds prepared by HA sphere packing and wax sphere leaching readily allowed penetration of fluid due to their favorable pore interconnectivity. The fluid velocity vector distribution predicted that circular flows dominated near the pore wall in the scaffold prepared by wax sphere leaching. These circular flows may impede the material exchange between cells attached to the pore wall and the body fluid, which may illustrate that the inferior in vivo osteogenic activity of scaffolds prepared by wax sphere leaching when compared with those produced by HA sphere packing.

Key words: tissue engineering scaffolds, structure image reconstruction, interconnectivity, computer modeling, fluid velocity distribution

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