Design and Development of Scaffolds for Tissue Engineering Using Three-Dimensional Printing for Bio-Based Applications

In recent years, tissue engineering (TE) has received more and more attention from scientific and research communities. One of the main requirements of this new approach is the fabrication of biocompatible and biodegradable scaffolds with required geometrical and mechanical properties. In TE, highly porous scaffold structures are required to provide a temporary mechanical support, to accommodate and guide the proliferation, regeneration, and growth of cells in three dimensions. This article presents an investigation on designing and fabricating possible scaffolds of a different internal structure with desired porosity and surface-area-to-volume ratio for TE applications by using the Creo Parametric computer-aided design system and the fused deposition modeling (FDM) three-dimensional printing technique. Scaffolds of various cell geometry structures are designed, and a simple FDM-type 3D printer is used to fabricate such scaffolds in biodegradable and biocompatible polylactic acid thermoplastics to verify the proposed approach. Finite element analysis and compression testing have been carried out to evaluate and analyze the mechanical strength of the proposed scaffolds.