The
design of scaffolds for tissue engineering has to consider
two trade-off properties: mechanical and mass-transport properties.
This is particularly true for additively manufactured scaffolds with
the structures of minimal surfaces, and notably, the influence of
the surface curvature of the structure on the mechanical and mass-transport
properties remains unclear. This work presents our study on the scaffolds
designed with the structure of triply periodic minimal surfaces (TPMS),
with a focus on discovering the influence of surface curvature on
the mechanical response and the mass-transport property or permeability
of the scaffolds. Based on the entropy weight fuzzy comprehensive
evaluation method, a model representative of both mechanical and permeable
properties of scaffolds was developed; scanning electron microscopy
(SEM) and finite element analysis (FEA) were also used to reveal the
influence mechanism of curvature on structural fracture and deformation
behavior. AlSi10Mg samples of scaffolds designed with different surface
curvatures were manufactured using selective laser melting (SLM),
and their mechanical and permeable properties were examined and characterized
by both experiments and simulations. Our results illustrate that at
the same porosity, the more concentrated the curvature distribution
of the same type of unit, the better trade-off mechanical and mass-transport
properties the scaffolds have. Particularly, at the porosity of 55%,
the compressive elastic modulus and permeability of the Dte structure
are increased by 2.03 times and 1.95 times compared with the Diamond
unit, respectively. The fusion structure can greatly improve permeability
performance at the cost of mechanical properties. Our results also
show that porosity has the greatest influence on mechanical and permeable
properties, followed by the surface curvature. The study illustrates
that the surface curvature has a significant influence on the mechanical
and permeable properties of scaffolds, and that the developed scaffold
performance evaluation scheme is an effective means for the optimization
and evaluation of scaffold performance.
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