Biomedical porous scaffold fabrication using additive manufacturing technique: Porosity, surface roughness and process parameters optimization

Abstract

Titanium is a most common and best biocompatible material. The demand and application of Ti alloy is increasing rapidly in orthopedics for clinical operations. The porous structures have been designed for bone tissue engineering or orthopedic applications due to its moderate Young's modulus, excellent compressive strength, biocompatibility and sufficient space for cell accommodation. The porous scaffolds with individual complex internal and external shape can be manufactured by additive manufacturing (AM) processes especially selective laser melting (SLM), both of these have great importance for repairing of large sectional bone defects. This advantage makes the SLM process one of the most competitive AM processes used in the biomedical fields. Seven different Ti–6Al–4V porous scaffolds (Diamond, Grid, Cross, Vinties, Tesseract, Star and Octet) of 15 mm cube with 65% porosity were designed using Rhino 6 software and fabricated through SLM using Ti–6Al–4V powders. This work mainly focused on porous scaffolds design and manufacturing by AM particularly SLM, can able to produce scaffolds of nanoscale grains because of its higher heating rate and lower holding time. But this process generally results insufficient compaction where desired function is not achieved. The scaffolds manufactured by SLM have relatively high accuracy of pore structure and low mechanical strength. Grid type structure exhibits lower surface roughness value and better manufacturing ability where error percentage of porosity is lower than the other scaffolds.The process parameters employed in the study like laser power, scanning speed, hatch distancing and layer thickness are the most significant factors that influence the defect behaviour and morphology of the SLM-fabricated samples. Porosity percentage and surface roughness of the scaffold palys a vital role on its desired functions. While the porosity percentage are also effected by input process parameters resulting the variation on effective elastic modulus. The increase in scanning speed leads to elevation of the cooling rate, which results in a finer microstructure. On the other hand, with lower scanning speeds, coarse microstructure is observed.