Abstract
Bone tissue engineering has been introduced several decades ago as a substitute for traditional grafting techniques to treat bone defects using engineered materials. The main goal in bone tissue engineering is to introduce materials and structures which can mimic the function of bone to restore the damaged tissue and promote cell restoration and proliferation. Titania and zirconia are well-known bioceramics which have been widely used in tissue engineering applications due to their unsurpassed characteristics. In this study, hierarchical meso/macroporous titania-zirconia (TiO2-ZrO2) nanocomposite scaffolds have been synthesized and evaluated for bone tissue engineering applications. The scaffolds were produced using the evaporation-induced self-assembly (EISA) technique along with the foamy method. To characterize the samples, X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS), simultaneous thermal analysis (STA), and Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) analysis were performed. The results showed that TiO2-ZrO2 scaffolds can be produced after sintering the samples at 550°C for 2 h. Among samples with different weight percentages of zirconia and titania, the sample containing 13 wt.% zirconia was considered as the optimum sample due to its structural integrity. This scaffold had pore size, pore wall size, and mesopores in the range of 185±66 μm, 15±4 μm, and 7-13 nm, respectively. The specific surface area obtained from the BET theory, total volume, and mean diameter of pores of this sample was 13.627 m2g1-, 0.03788 cm3g-1, and 11 nm, respectively. The results showed that the produced scaffolds can be considered as the promising candidates for cancellous bone regeneration.
Highlights
To assess the weight loss and to determine the temperature of reactions that occurred during the sintering procedure of TiO2-ZrO2 scaffolds, simultaneous thermal analysis (STA) was utilized
Different samples (Table 1, SS which contains only solution, SF which contains only PU foam, and SSF which contains a solution with PU foam together), 3 samples for each, were used to accurately determine the effect of each component on the STA traces
The results proved that at the sintering temperature, no sponge was left in the structure
Summary
A great deal of effort and attention has been focused on designing scaffolds which are biologically, chemically, physically, mechanically, and structurally carefully matched to that of natural bone [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23]. Bone has a complex meso/macroporous hierarchical structure [24,25,26,27,28,29] with multisized interconnected pores [30, 31]. One of the main issues is to synthesize scaffolds with a hierarchical porous structure with pore interconnectivity to mimic the ECM of the host tissue. Different pore sizes play a remarkable role in enhancing cell viability and osteogenesis and in therapeutic effects for bone tissue engineering applications [32,33,34,35,36]. Mesopores with the size of 2-50 nm are required to insert the nutrients and release the biological agents, to remove waste materials, and to enhance the surface activity and bioactivity [37, 40,41,42]
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