ABSTRACT
Tissue engineering aims at the development of biological substitutes that restore, maintain, and improve tissue function. Hard tissue (bone) damage occurs due to trauma and diseases and has to be regenerated or replaced with another suitable tissue or implants. Conventional treatment techniques such as autograft and allograft procedures are expensive, complicated, and infectious. Hence, 3D printed scaffolds are used to overcome these complications and problems. Scaffolds provide temporary structural support for cell attachment and the subsequent tissue growth. In this work, homogeneous interconnected (pores) scaffold structures were modeled by varying pore size, porosity, strut cross section, and by keeping the same 92unit cell size. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis was done for different scaffold structures by considering Darcy’s equation to know the permeability of the scaffold with blood properties. Studies were carried out to find out the impact of the design parameters such as porosity, strut cross section, and size on the scaffold functional factor like permeability. Through the ANSYS software, analysis is done to calculate the nature and properties of fluid flow through the scaffold structure. Permeability is calculated using Darcy’s permeability equation for incompressible laminar flow equation and was found to be in the range of 4.8 × 10−9 to 2.3 × 10−8 m2 for strut cross section of 300–500 μm. Results showed that strut cross section and porosity were the influencing parameters and play an important role in the scaffold design.
