Abstract
Within the last decade, there has been increasing interest in liquid and solid foams for several industrial uses. In the biomedical field, liquid foams can be used as delivery systems for dermatological treatments, for example, whereas solid foams are frequently used as scaffolds for tissue engineering and drug screening. Most of the foam functionalities are largely correlated to their mechanical properties and their structure, especially bubble/pore size, shape, and interconnectivity. However, the majority of conventional foaming fabrication techniques lack pore size control which can induce important inhomogeneities in the foams and subsequently decrease their performance. In this perspective, new advanced technologies have been introduced, such as microfluidics, which offers a highly controlled production, allowing for design customization of both liquid foams and solid foams obtained through liquid-templating. This short review explores both the fabrication and the characterization of foams, with a focus on solid polymer foams, and sheds the light on how microfluidics can overcome some existing limitations, playing a crucial role in their production for biomedical applications, especially as scaffolds in tissue engineering.
Highlights
Foams are lightweight materials made from dispersions of gas bubbles in a continuous matrix which can either be liquid or solid, giving birth to liquid or solid foams respectively [1]
We present how microfluidics can play a crucial role in foam production for biomedical applications, for scaffolds in tissue engineering, due to the strong dependence of their biomechanical properties on pore size, porosity, and geometry, which can all be tuned by microfluidics
Solid foams are self-assembled porous structures, which are employed as scaffolds with varying pore morphologies that cater to their clinical application [98,99] in tissue engineering
Summary
Foams are lightweight materials made from dispersions of gas bubbles in a continuous matrix which can either be liquid or solid, giving birth to liquid or solid foams respectively [1]. The ability to control biomaterial physico-chemical properties down to micrometer and nanometer scales [47] has opened new routes in biomedicine for cell transplantation [48], drug release [9,49], health monitoring [50,51,52], diagnostics [53], and therapeutic treatments in situ [54,55] This short contribution reviews the principal batch fabrication methods used to produce liquid and solid foams, showing both their advantages and disadvantages, and how the advent of microfluidic approaches can overcome some limitations and bottlenecks (of batch processes) related to the production. We focused this short review on polymeric foams because, far, these are the types that can be handled with microfluidics
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