Fig 1.
Schematic illustrations of different scaffold internal structures; A) lattice, B) staggered.
Fig 2.
Schematic illustration of an actual 3D printed scaffold made by extrusion-based 3D printer; D = strand diameter, L = distance between strands, Δ0 = layer penetration, Px = pore width, Pz = pore height.
Fig 3.
A representative stress-strain curve of a 3D printed PCL/30% (wt.) nHAp scaffold obtained after compressive testing displaying the linear region to derive E () and the point pertaining to Sy.
Fig 4.
SEM images of lattice scaffolds; A) 4 layers, B) 6 layers, C) 8 layers, D) 10 layers, and staggered scaffolds; E) 4 layers, F) 6 layers, G) 8 layers, H) 10 layers.
I) Bar graphs showing apparent porosities of lattice and staggered scaffolds with different numbers of layers (values pertain to the total porosity of scaffolds and not the porosity of each 3D printed layer), J) Quantitative values (M ± SD) of porosities for different scaffold groups.
Table 1.
Strand diameter and distance between strands for lattice and staggered scaffolds (Data are shown as M ± SD).
Fig 5.
Amount of penetration between subsequent printed layers; A) lattice scaffolds, B) staggered scaffolds (Data are presented as M ± SD).
Fig 6.
Size of pore width (Px) and pore height (Pz) for scaffolds with different numbers of layers; A1-A2) lattice scaffold, B1-B2) staggered scaffold (Data are presented as M ± SD).
Fig 7.
A) Representative images of 3D printed scaffolds with different numbers of layers (4, 6, 8, and 10 layers), B) Bar graphs pertaining to the heights of scaffolds with different numbers of layers (Data are presented as M ± SD, *p ≤ 0.05).
Fig 8.
Elastic modulus and yield strength of lattice and staggered scaffolds vs. the number of 3D printed layers (Data are presented as M ± SD, *p ≤ 0.05).
Table 2.
Elastic modulus for lattice and staggered scaffolds with differing numbers of layers (Data are presented as M ± SD).
Table 3.
Yield strength for lattice and staggered scaffolds with differing numbers of layers (Data are presented as M ± SD).
Fig 9.
Representative stress-strain curves for lattice and staggered scaffolds with 4 layers upon compression.
All three different regions are marked for each internal structure.