Fabrication of tissue engineering scaffolds via rapid prototyping machine

Porous scaffolds made of β-tricalcium phosphate(β-TCP) are promising structures to develop tissue engineering bone repair. In this paper, some porous scaffold was introduced and designed with Computer Aided Design (CAD) software. In order to fabricate such scaffolds, Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), a kind of rapid prototyping technique, which uses ABS to form moulds by a small temperature-controlled extruder, was used to produce casting moulds for ceramic casting. Then these moulds were filled with β-tricalcium phosphate ceramic slurry which was composed of some high-temperature binder solution and β-tricalcium phosphate. The slurry inside casting moulds would solidify by keeping at a temperature of 50°C for 12 hours. After burning the ABS mould out and sintering β-tricalcium phosphate structures, scaffolds with fully interconnected macropore would be obtained. Their microstructures which have been investigated by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffraction analysis, porosity analysis, compressive test of scaffold and morphology analysis exhibit excellent scaffolds for bone repair.