CHARACTERIZATION OF NATURAL FIBRE EMBEDDED BIODEGRADABLE POROUS STRUCTURE PREPARED BY ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING by Amarveer Singh Mangat
Abstract
Additive manufacturing is being widely used for various constructional, mechanical and medical
applications. Fused deposition modelling is one of the rapidly growing technologies amongst others that has gained wide popularity owing to its excellent suitability for building various medical constructions. In this research work, a new methodology has been adopted for the development of natural fibre embedded laminated structure. Natural fibres such as sheep wool and silk were collected and chemically cleaned for making these suitable for biomedical applications. Various process parameters (Type of fibres, number of laminates, infill density and raster angle) were selected and their effects have been studied with the help of design of experimentation and analysis of variance. In this work, different mechanical (tensile, flexural, dimensional accuracy and hardness) and chemical (cell culture and Anti-bacterial) properties were tested. Overall, the outcomes of the study are encouraging and helpful for the selection of appropriate process parameters and their levels. It has been found that the tensile and flexural strength were affected by number of laminates and infill density, whereas elongation was affected by type of fibre and number of laminates, similarly hardness and dimensional accuracy were affected by type of fibre, number of laminates and infill density. All observation were found significant at 95% confidence level. Moreover, the chemical characterization confirmed the suitability of the produced structures for scaffold and other tissue engineering applications
