Abstract
Based on the data from the National Sports Hospital of Indonesia in 2015, the sports injury cases in adults reached 1.5 million/year and in kids increased to 3-4 million/year. The body part that often gets injured is the knee, especially the Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) which reached 50% of all the cases of knee injuries. The healing potential in ACL injury is very low due to poor vascularization. Therefore, many surgeons still prefer to perform surgery as an alternative way to treat the ACL injury. The use of artificial ligament for ACL surgery has many advantages compared to the autograft or allograft. In the previous study, PLLA was used as an artificial ligament. However, the ultimate tensile strength (UTS) was only 7 MPa, which is not reached the standard value for ACL. With the copolymerization between PLLA and PCL into PLA-CL, it is expected a material which fulfills the artificial ligament's standards. In addition, by using the braiding method, it is expected that the UTS value will be increased. This study is aimed to determine the effects of the variations in copolymer PLA-CL composition and the effects of the braiding angle. The variations in the composition that were used are 100:0, 85:15, 15:85 and 0:100 while the angular variations are 70° and 80°. The characteristics tested were functional groups, fiber morphology, pore size, mechanical properties, wettability, cytotoxicity, and degradation rate. The results of functional group tests with FTIR showed a shift in wave number and the appearance of chemical bonds in PLA-CL copolymers. The addition of caprolactone concentration could increase the fiber diameter and the pore size between fibers, which caused the decreasing of the mechanical strength. It could also increase the contact angle and the percentage of living cells, but it inhibited the degradation process. The optimal braiding angle based on the tensile test is 80°. The potential sample for artificial ligament candidate is PLA-CL (85:15) with 80° for the braiding angle which has the UTS score amount 33.50 MPa.
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