pps proceeding - Abstract Preview
pps proceeding
Symposium: S08 - Polymer Foams
Oral Presentation
 
 

Microcellular foam processing and characterization of Poly(lactic acid) based blend foams for biomedical applications

Goswami Jutika (1)*, Ghosh Anup K. (2), Bhatnagar Naresh (3)

(1) Indian Institute of Technology Delhi - New Delhi - India, (2) Centre for Polymer Science & Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi - New Delhi - India, (3) Mechanical Engineering Department, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi - New Delhi - India

Microcellular scaffold designing using biodegradable polymeric materials has been one of the critical issues in tissue engineering applications. Research focus on use of polymeric scaffolds for tissue engineering purposes has got momentum recently considering the harmful effects of metallic implants in-vivo. Poly(lactic acid) (PLA) has been explored extensively for this purposes as it is easily available, biodegradable and biocompatible in nature. But PLA needs property modification because of its limitations related to mechanical and thermal behavior. Poly(ε-caprolactone) (PCL) is another biodegradable polymer which can complement PLA properties for scaffolding purposes while improving its toughness behavior. In the current study, PLA and PCL has been melt extruded in a series in 85/15, 70/30 and 50/50 ratio. Injection moulded samples were used for foaming in an attempt to prepare microcellular scaffolds using supercritical CO2 as blowing agent. DSC and SEM study of blends confirmed immisciblity between PLA and PCL, and this immiscible phase boundary has been utilized as CO2 absorption sites that improved PLA foamability to a great extent. It has been found that foamabilty is strongly dependent upon immiscible blend morphology, because, gas absorption and corresponding nucleation of bubbles is affected by the PCL domain size in PLA matrix. The domain size, in turn, can be varied by the amount of the minor component and thus, it provides a way for microcells’ size modulation. Among the prepared blends, PLA85PCL15 composition having 15 % PCL content produced most uniform and lowest sized cells with highest cell density. Accordingly, this particular blend composition gave lowest foam density and highest volume expansion ratio. The SEM scans of the foams have been analyzed using image processing software that produced Voronoi grids which indicated the foaming (%) achieved under the processing condition as against 100 % foamed product.