Additive manufacturing of bioactive and biodegradable porous iron-akermanite composites for bone regeneration

Advanced additive manufacturing techniques have been recently used to tackle the two fundamental challenges of biodegradable Fe-based bone-substituting materials, namely low rate of biodegradation and insufficient bioactivity. While additively manufactured porous iron has been somewhat successful in addressing the first challenge, the limited...

Poly(2-ethyl-2-oxazoline) coating of additively manufactured biodegradable porous iron

Additively manufacturing of porous iron offers a unique opportunity to increase its biodegradation rate by taking advantage of arbitrarily complex porous structures. Nevertheless, achieving the required biodegradation profile remains challenging due to the natural passivation of iron that decrease the biodegradation rate. Moreover, the...

Extrusion-based 3D printed biodegradable porous iron

Extrusion-based 3D printing followed by debinding and sintering is a powerful approach that allows for the fabrication of porous scaffolds from materials (or material combinations) that are otherwise very challenging to process using other additive manufacturing techniques. Iron is one of the materials that have been recently shown to be...

Extrusion-based 3D printing of ex situ-alloyed highly biodegradable MRI-friendly porous iron-manganese scaffolds

Additively manufactured biodegradable porous iron has been only very recently demonstrated. Two major limitations of such a biomaterial are very low biodegradability and incompatibility with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Here, we present a novel biomaterial that resolves both of those limitations. We used extrusion-based 3D printing to...

A new semi-orthotopic bone defect model for cell and biomaterial testing in regenerative medicine

In recent decades, an increasing number of tissue engineered bone grafts have been developed. However, expensive and laborious screenings in vivo are necessary to assess the safety and efficacy of their formulations. Rodents are the first choice for initial in vivo screens but their size limits the dimensions and number of the bone grafts...

On the Use of Black Ti as a Bone Substituting Biomaterial: Behind the Scenes of Dual-Functionality

Despite the potential of small-scale pillars of black titanium (bTi) for killing the bacteria and directing the fate of stem cells, not much is known about the effects of the pillars’ design parameters on their biological properties. Here, three distinct bTi surfaces are designed and fabricated through dry etching of the titanium, each...

Mechanics of Bone-substituting Meta-biomaterials

One of the main functions of bone is to support the human body mechanically. To fulfil its complex role, bone possesses unique mechanical properties: it is stiff enough to resist deformation while being able to absorb energy.<br/>In this thesis, a comprehensive study has been carried out using analytical methods, numerical methods and...

Analytical relationships for prediction of the mechanical properties of additively manufactured porous biomaterials

Recent developments in additive manufacturing techniques have motivated an increasing number of researchers to study regular porous biomaterials that are based on repeating unit cells. The physical and mechanical properties of such porous biomaterials have therefore received increasing attention during recent years. One of the areas that have...