Abstract
Selective laser sintering (SLS) shows great potential to produce porous bone tissue scaffolds in tissue engineering. The scaffolds made of pure PHBV by SLS could reach the requirement of porous structure but show lack of stiffness and over-flexible. The properties of the scaffold could be modified by mixing with ceramic powders. Akermanite (AKM) is considered a promising bioactive material for bone tissue engineering. In this project, scaffolds made by SLS with different AKM mass fraction were assessed, to investigate the effect of mixing AKM powder and PHBV powder as a sintering material. The microstructure, porosity and pore size were assessed with the assist of ImageJ and Python. It is found that the addition of AKM ceramic into PHBV generally improves the powder sintering, the average size of fused material increases and the porosity usually decreases. The results also showed that the milled AKM ceramic powder shows better blend uniformity than the as-received AKM powder. The pore size measurement showed the weighted average pore size suits the required size for bone tissue regeneration. Further study was suggested to focus on the mechanical property testing and the implant experiment.
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