Date of Award

2018

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Mechanical Engineering

First Advisor

Alexandru Biris

Abstract

In natural disasters and military deployment operations, injury to long bone can cause extensive damage and be difficult to treat and heal quickly. Explosive devices and trauma often produce long-bone (>2-cm length) wounds that are more complicated than common fractures. Due to the size and complexity of these injuries, they can be difficult to treat in a battlefield environment and take a long time to heal completely and properly. Even after the long healing period, these injuries often require rehabilitation to strengthen the muscles that have weakened in the wounded limb. For military applications especially, these effects can put a patient out of commission for multiple months to a year or more. While commercial bone grafts for large bone gaps exist, most of them do not have a structure suitable for healing bone. Bones are inherently porous yet strong and rigid—a difficult combination of features to replicate synthetically. Therefore, bone scaffolds can be improved through biomimetics, or the study and imitation of these natural properties, an underexplored area of bone tissue engineering. Herein, we report the creation of successful bone scaffolds that mimic the natural features of phone. To replicate the components of natural bone, the scaffolds were constructed using polymers with various sizes of particles loaded into them, thereby creating a composite matrix.

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