3-dimensional printing of PLA scaffolds for medical applications

Scaffolds encourage the new tissue formation through biological substitution of the damaged or lost tissues. Therefore, scaffold characteristics become more important and should be precisely controlled. Production of scaffolds using a three dimensional (3d) printer appears as a promising method in terms of enabling homogeneous pore distribution and uniform pore size arrangement. In this study, polylactic acid (PLA) scaffold structures were obtained through 3d printing, based on the design parameters such as the scaffold geometry, porosity (%), pore shape, pore size, and the pore interconnectivity. An open source computer-aided design (CAD) program (Interface Scaffold) was employed to design the PLA scaffolds. Scaffold structures with ~72% porosity were generated through a 3D Systems Cube 2nd Generation 3d printer. The design parameters have been optimized by the scaffold design software tool, which includes different unit cells, i.e. Schwartz P, Schwartz D, Gyroid, Skeletal (1-4), Neovius and W (iWP) for designing scaffold structures through mathematical formulations. It was found out that the mean pore size of the 3d-printed Gyroid unit cell scaffolds vary between 1.9 mm and ~4.54 mm according to the microstructural observations done by a scanning electron microscope (SEM).