Computational mechanical characterization of geometrically transformed Schwarz P lattice tissue scaffolds fabricated via two photon polymerization (2PP)

Zabidi, Adi Z. and Li, Shuguang and Felfel, Reda M. and Thomas, Kathryn G. and Grant, David M. and McNally, Donal and Scotchford, Colin (2019) Computational mechanical characterization of geometrically transformed Schwarz P lattice tissue scaffolds fabricated via two photon polymerization (2PP). Additive Manufacturing, 25. pp. 399-411. ISSN 2214-8604 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addma.2018.11.021)

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Abstract

Schwarz P unit cell-based tissue scaffolds comprised of poly(D,L-lactide-co- ε -caprolactone)(PLCL) fabricated via the additive manufacturing technique, two-photon polymerisation (2 P P) were found to undergo geometrical transformations from the original input design. A Schwarz P unit cell surface geometry CAD model was reconstructed to take into account the geometrical transformations through CAD modeling techniques using measurements obtained from an image-based averaging technique before its implementation for micromechanical analysis. Effective modulus results obtained from computational mechanical characterization via micromechanical analysis of the reconstructed unit cell assigned with the same material model making up the fabricated scaffolds demonstrated excellent agreement with a small margin of error at 6.94% from the experimental mean modulus (0.69 ± 0.29 MPa). The possible sources for the occurrence of geometrical transformations are discussed in this paper. The inter-relationships between different dimensional parameters making up the Schwarz P architecture and resulting effective modulus are also assessed and discussed. With the ability to accommodate the geometrical transformations, maintain efficiency in terms of time and computational resources, micromechanical analysis has the potential to be implemented in tissue scaffolds with a periodic microstructure as well as other structures outside the field of tissue engineering in general.

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