Customized Load-Bearing Scaffolds Using Multiscale Porosity and Multi-Material Domains

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). The research objective of this award is to develop manufacturing technology enabling the fabrication of multi-material, near net-shape tissue engineering scaffolds for bone defect repair. This will enable a new class of functionally graded scaffolds and will result in advances in the current state of the art for both rapid prototype manufacturing and bone tissue engineering research. The technology will make use of Iterative Learning Control to learn trajectories for robotic manufacturing tasks using a vision-based system. Learned functions will be stored as a library and used for constructing any arbitrary scaffold by sequencing combinations of the individual functions. The technology will enable the fabrication of novel scaffolds with 6-12 twelve combinations of macropore and micropore size and fraction in a single scaffold, which will allow for unprecedented progress in determining pore combinations that result in the fastest, most complete bone healing. The approach will require a fraction of the number of costly in vivo experiments and will obtain significantly more information in the process. If successful, the research will address a basic and growing health need in our society, namely the need for more effective options for bone defect repair. The research will also contribute to manufacture of engineered scaffolds as well as to the fundamental understanding of the role of macro and microporosities on bone ingrowth. Aspects of manufacturing and biological materials will be incorporated into the existing curriculum with the goal of making every mechanical engineering student familiar with tissue scaffolds as a design and manufacturing challenge and every bioengineering student familiar with manufacturing as an important aspect of tissue engineering. The lessons learned will be packaged for dissemination through educational channels like courses, summer camps, and undergraduate research projects, as well as through Engineering Open House, which draws thousands of visitors to campus annually.