Design, analysis and fabrication of polyamide/hydroxyapatite porous structured scaffold using selective laser sintering method for bio-medical applications

Both medical and engineering sciences play a vital role in human health diagnose and treatment. In this scientific world, the technology of alternative bone scaffold is one of the remedial sources for bone loss treatment. This research paper focuses on the design and analysis of porous scaffold made of additive manufacturing process. Various types of biocompatible materials with different characteristics are used for this bone scaffold. In order to have high load bearing capacity, a material composition of biocompatible Polyamide (PA) combined with Hydroxyapatite (HA) is used in this research work. HA has the character of greater cell seeding growth of tissue cells and hence added in the composition. The porous scaffold models with different configuration of cubical pore, spherical pore, shifted cubical pore, shifted spherical pore are designed using Solidworks software with a pore size of 800 microns and the porosity ranging from 40 % to 70 %. All the CAD models are analyzed using ANSYS software. Based on the static structural analysis, the shifted cubical scaffold posses lesser stress concentration, and thus selected for fabrication using Selective Laser Sintering machine. The specimens are fabricated in three different build orientations and the load bearing strength is found out using experimentation. The different material composition of 100 %PA, 95 %PA: 5 %HA, 90 %PA: 10 %HA and 85 %PA: 15 %HA are considered for this study.