Physical Impacts of Compaction Treatments on PET Textile Vascular Prostheses

Textile cardiovascular prostheses are woven or knitted structures made generally from biocompatible polyester fibres. After production, they have to undergo special treatments before packaging such as compaction. This treatment is necessary to reduce porosity especially for knitted structures, but it can modify poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) polymer’s properties. We have studied the effect of chemical and thermal compaction process parameters on physical properties of PET with DSC and XRD techniques. The obtained results show changes of glass transition temperature according to compaction parameters. A multiple melting peaks thermograms were observed for untreated and most compacted samples indicating differences between crystallites sizes. The compaction treatment involves an increase of PET crystallites size because of molecular bonds rearrangement among the polymeric chains. With DRX, we have showed crystallites size increases for compacted samples when compared with untreated samples. This increase is particularly important in perpendicular direction to (010) crystallographic plane.