A method to improve the cured bonding strength at the weak juncture of the porous hydrogel scaffold

Abstract

Purpose

Hydrogel is an excellent material for the fabrication of porous scaffold by mask-prototyping method. Different from the common commercial resin, hydrogel is hydrophilic and hyperelastic, so that it cannot bear the conventional post-curing process to improve its mechanical properties. The purpose of this paper is to put forward a method to improve the curing bonding strength at the weak juncture of the porous hydrogel scaffold.

Design/methodology/approach

The working curve of the resin was obtained through the single layer cure experiment, and the energy accumulation model has been set up by MATLAB. Aimed at the specificity of material, a new method of partial curing on different kind of structure has been proposed. Under the same condition, only the tn2 needs to be changed to fabricate different test specimens with different accumulated energy between two layers. The tensile test is carried out with the authors’ preferred equipment.

Findings

The analysis reveals that accumulated energy can be changed by adjusting the key parameters, and the tensile test shows that when the accumulated energy is bigger, the ultimate tensile strength is higher.

Research limitations/implications

Subject to the equipment accuracy and specificity of material, some errors coming from the experiment and test might exist, but the authors believe they will not change their findings and conclusions in this paper.

Practical implications

The research provides a method which is different from the common methods but friendlier to improve the bonding strength of the hydrogel scaffold.

Social implications

This work can help to adjust the mechanical property of the scaffold used in tissue engineering.

Originality/value

This method can improve the bonding strength at weak juncture and give a direction for the design of porous scaffold.

Citation

Liu, W., Sun, D., Tang, A. and Li, M. (2018), "A method to improve the cured bonding strength at the weak juncture of the porous hydrogel scaffold", Rapid Prototyping Journal, Vol. 24 No. 6, pp. 1049-1058. https://doi.org/10.1108/RPJ-09-2017-0175