Fabrication of Porous Hydroxyapatite Scaffolds

This work describes two novel techniques for the fabrication of porous hydroxyapatite scaffolds for calcified tissue engineering; robocasting and freeze casting. These techniques allow the fabrication of materials with complex porosity. Both are based on the preparation of concentrated ceramic suspensions with suitable properties for the process. In robocasting, the computer-guided deposition of the suspensions is used to build porous materials with designed three dimensional (3-D) geometries and microstructures. Freeze casting uses ice crystals as a template to form porous lamellar ceramic materials. Preliminary results on the compressive strengths of the materials are also reported.