Finite element analysis of irregular porous scaffold for bone tissue engineering

Abstract

The structure of natural bone, particularly the trabecular structure, is irregular in the microscopic structure. Some related research had demonstrated that irregular porous structures like cancellous were better for cell growth. The correlations between irregular porous structure design parameters and porosity, average pore size, and associated mechanical properties are also complicated. This research uses finite element analysis to analyze irregular porous scaffold models of PLA/HA composite mechanical characteristics. The factors for the design parameters investigated in this study are strut diameters (SD), composite materials (M), and loading orientation (D). A full factorial design of experiments (FFD) was used to determine the optimal mechanical parameters of structure scaffold design. The results of our study illustrated that composite materials and strut diameter are essential factors for compressive strength and elastic modulus. Still, the strut diameter was the most critical variable in this simulation study. This study found that variation of loading direction at all irregular porous scaffolds in this research does little to affect compressive strength and elastic modulus. The optimization method showed that the desired results are obtained with the Z loading direction, 30% hydroxyapatite composition, and 0.65 mm strut diameter. Maximum compressive strength and elastic modulus were calculated to be 25.93 MPa and 1295.24 MPa, respectively. These results suggest that the bone scaffold elastic modulus and compressive strength are comparable to the trabecular bone but less than cortical bone.