| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣科技大學 === 機械工程系 === 102 === Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies have been applied to fabricate tissue engineering scaffolds nowadays to solve issues such as pore-size control and geometry shapes in traditional methods. Most AM approaches utilize extrusion or sintering, yet few by photo-curing. In the previous research in our lab, preliminary study on photo-curable PCL material (PCL-DA) combining with PEG-diacrylate (PEG-DA) cured by Dynamic Masking Rapid Prototyping System was conducted, but material properties are not well understood. Besides, the over-curing issue of the material limited the number of layers being fabricated. Therefore, in this research, more material properties were investigated, and fabrication capability were improved.
Three ratios (6:4, 7:3, 8:2) of PCL-DA to PEG-DA were studied. Thermal analyzer equipments (TMA, DSC, and TGA) were used to determine the coefficient of thermal expansion of the materials and understand their thermal stability. Degradation tests revealed weight loss and pH value of materials within 60 days. Moreover, the L929 cells were cultures in vitro on the cured PCL-DA/PEG-DA thin-film to observe biocompatibility. The results from SEM observation and MTT tests proved cell adhesion and growth on the cured materials. Besides, in order to improve scaffold fabrication capability, two strategies were proposed to eliminate over-curing issue of transparent materials—multi-pattern geometry design and dyed materials. The multi-pattern design can provide various sizes of connecting pores for cells growth, but the effects on avoiding over-curing is limited. On the other hand, dyed materials can block the light to over-cure previously cured layers effectively and increase the stackable numbers of layers from 8 to 20 and more. The scaffold fabrication capability has successfully been improved.
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