Research articles
Chang YANG, Yun-Qing KANG, Xiao-Ming LIAO, Ya-Dong YAO, Zhong-Bing HUANG, Guang-Fu YIN,
A high porosity scaffold with suitable compressive strength prepared by a gentle method has become a pressing need. To meet this demand, poly(DL-lactide-co-glycolide) (PLGA) and β-tricalcium phosphate (β-TCP) were designed to prepare composite scaffolds by the supercritical technique. The preparation process consisted of three units: the mixing of PLGA and β-TCP, compression molding of the mixture, and the foaming process. Six influencing factors — temperature, pressure of the scCO2 system, maintaining time of scCO2, the ratio of β-TCP to PLGA, the rate of depressurization, and the molecular weight — were investigated. The results collectively indicated that the optimized conditions for the foaming process were that CO2 pressure and temperature be 8MPa and 39°C, respectively, which should be kept for 8h; the content of β-TCP in the mixture should be 25% and the depressurizing rate be 0.1 MPa/s, using PLGA of an 80kDa molecular weight. Scaffolds with a porosity of 65.47% and a compressive strength of 4.76 MPa could be obtained. The pore size ranged around 100 µm. The material’s use as tissue engineering scaffolding is expected.
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tilt grain boundaries with different misorientation angles was measured in situ in bicrystals of high purity zinc. The results proved that there is a pronounced misorientation dependence of grain boundary mobility in the investigated angular range. The shear stress induced migration of planar symmetric 〈100〉 tilt boundaries in aluminum bicrystals was observed to be accompanied by a lateral translation of the adjacent grains. The coupling between boundary motion and shearing is not confined to low angle and some low Σ high angle boundaries, but occurs also for non-coincidence high angle 〈100〉 tilt boundaries. It has been found that also for stress induced grain boundary motion there is a misorientation dependence of the migration activation parameters. Lower values of the activation enthalpy and the pre-exponential mobility factor can be associated with boundaries with tilt angles close to low Σ CSL orientation relationships.