Abstract
Poly(lactic acid) (PLA) suture can be absorbed by the human body, and so have wide applications in modern surgery operations. The degradation period of PLA suture is expected to meet with the healing time of different types of wounds. In order to control the degradation period of the PLA suture, the carbon nanotubes (CNTs) were composited with PLA suture, and the degradation experiment in vitro was performed on sutures. The structure and properties of sutures during degradation, such as surface morphology, breaking strength, elongation, mass and chemical structure, were tracked and analyzed. The results indicated that the degradation brought about surface defects and resulted in 13.5 weeks for the strength valid time of the original PLA suture. By contrast, the strength valid time of the CNTs/PLA suture was increased to 26.6 weeks. Whilst the toughness of both the pure PLA and CNTs/PLA sutures decreased rapidly and almost disappeared after 3 to 4 weeks of degradation. The mass loss demonstrated that the time required for complete degradation of the two sutures was obviously different, the pure PLA suture 49 weeks, while CNTs/PLA sutures 63 to 73 weeks. The research proved that CNTs delayed PLA degradation and prolonged its strength valid time in degradation.
Highlights
Medical sutures are made from Poly(lactic acid) (PLA) which is derived from agriculture products.It has several attractive features, such as harmless, biocompatibility, biodegradability, and high strength [1,2,3]
carbon nanotubes (CNTs) contents on CNTs/PLA suture degradation, this paper attempts to establish an effective way to retard the degradation of PLA based suture and to achieve control of the suture degradation rate and time
CNTs reinforced PLA sutures and enhanced their crystallinity and orientation [34, 37], thence the sutures degraded more slowly. These results indicate that CNTs can slow down the degradation rate
Summary
Medical sutures are made from Poly(lactic acid) (PLA) which is derived from agriculture products. There are many ways to increase the strength of PLA based sutures, and adding nano-reinforcing materials such as carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and graphene into the PLA fiber matrix has been reported to be an effective and popular method [24,25,26]. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and other characterization equipment were employed to observe the degradation process of the CNTs/PLA sutures, during which the suture strength, mass loss, and appearance were measured and evaluated Through this investigation on the influence of CNTs contents on CNTs/PLA suture degradation, this paper attempts to establish an effective way to retard the degradation of PLA based suture and to achieve control of the suture degradation rate and time
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