Fabrication of trabecular-like beta-tricalcium phosphate biomimetic scaffolds for bone tissue engineering

Abstract The introduction of 3D printing into the manufacturing of ceramic components offers new possibilities to fabricate porous bioceramic scaffold with biomimetic morphology, customized-designed shape and suitable mechanical property for bone tissue engineering. However, most of 3D printed porous ceramic scaffolds are prepared from the array of unit cells, which do not exploit the whole potential of additive manufacturing. In this paper, a novel biomimetic porous beta-tricalcium phosphate (β-TCP) scaffolds with trabecular-like morphology were obtained based on three dimension (3D) Voronoi tessellation method and generated design. This bionic pore structure is fabricated via photopolymer-based digital light processing (DLP) 3D printing technique, a suitable 30 wt% β-TCP ceramic slurry with the addition of adjuvants was prepared. After optimized debinding-sintering process according the TG-DSC analysis, the β-TCP scaffolds showed fully interconnected trabecular-like pore structure with tailorable pore size (360 μm–1200 μm) and porosity (45%–75%) and compact microstructure. Combining compressive tests and finite element analysis (FEA), the relationship between inputting parameters, pore structure and compressive strength is investigated. Thus, the mechanical strength of the trabecular-like β-TCP scaffolds could be predicted and tuned in the initial generated design stage. In addition, the shrinkage ratio and XRD pattern are also detected. The method proposed in this study may provide an efficient bionic design intended for tissue engineering applications.