Morphology and Mechanical Properties of PLLA and PCL Scaffolds

Human tissue engineering, comprising methods and tools to create implants, is a promising although as yet a very underdeveloped field of research into the regeneration of specific damaged or necrotic tissue. Porous scaffolds play an important role in tissue engineering. The porous cell culture scaffolds in this study were produced through thermally induced phase separation (lyophilization). This technique yields considerable variations in scaffold microstructures (pore size and morphology) as a function of the polymer, solvent and thermal processing. PLLA and PCL were used with chloroform, 1,4-dioxane and water as solvent. We observed a decrease in mechanical properties with increasing pore size in the two polymers under study. However, we found that PLLA, which possesses larger pore sizes than PCL, showed superior mechanical properties, which we explain in terms of crystallinity.