DefinePK

Abstract

For bone tissue engineering, regeneration and healing, a porous scaffold with interconnected network is highly sort after for cell guidance, cell attachment and growth in three dimension structure. Using freeze drying technique, we produced three types of scaffold. PCL scaffold, PCL/HA nanocomposite scaffold and a conductive scaffold PCL/HA/PPY. Conductive scaffold was produced to render the scaffold conductive. The scaffolds were characterized and evaluated using a number of techniques. Composite scaffolds with suitable pore size distribution were obtained by freezing the polymer solution mixture at -18?C, which was controlled by the polymer and solvent phase crystallization. From the result, the wettability and porosity of the sample were observed to increase more with the incorporation of Polypyrrole scaffold than in Polycaprolactone scaffold alone. PCL/HA/PPY scaffold had a lower porosity than PCL and PCL/HA scaffolds. The compressive modulus increased form 1.15Mpa (PCL) up to 6.10Mpa in PCL/HA/PPY scaffold. Incorporation of PPY polymer renders the scaffold conductive. Hence, the characteristics of PCL/HA/PPY scaffold studied in this present work shows good prospect and may probably be employed for bone tissue engineering applications.