A Novel Bone Scaffold Design Approach Based on Shape Function and All-Hexahedral Mesh Refinement

Abstract

Tissue engineering is the application of interdisciplinary knowledge in the building and repairing of tissues. Generally, an engineered tissue is a combination of living cells and a support structure called a scaffold. The scaffold provides support for bone-producing cells and can be used to heal or replace a defective bone. In this chapter, a novel bone scaffold design approach based on shape function and an all-hexahedral mesh refinement method is presented. Based on the shape function in the finite element method, an all-hexahedral mesh is used to design a porous bone scaffold. First, the individual pore based on the subdivided individual element is modeled; then, the Boolean operation union among the pores is used to generate the whole pore model of TE bone scaffold; finally, the bone scaffold which contains various irregular pores can be modeled by the Boolean operation difference between the solid model and the whole pore model. From the SEM images, the pore size distribution in the native bone is not randomly distributed and there are gradients for pore size distribution. Therefore, a control approach for pore size distribution in the bone scaffold based on the hexahedral mesh refinement is also proposed in this chapter. A well-defined pore size distribution can be achieved based on the fact that a hexahedral element size distribution can be obtained through an all-hexahedral mesh refinement and the pore morphology and size are under the control of the hexahedral element. The designed bone scaffold can be converted to a universal 3D file format (such as STL or STEP) which could be used for rapid prototyping (RP). Finally, 3D printing (Spectrum Z510), a type of RP system, is adopted to fabricate these bone scaffolds. The successfully fabricated scaffolds validate the novel computer-aided design approach in this research.