Aligned porous barium titanate/hydroxyapatite composites with high piezoelectric coefficients for bone tissue engineering

• Systematical characterizations on pore characteristic of HA/BT ceramics
• Well aligned lamellar pores obtained by the ice-templating process
• Adjustment on the pore characteristics of ice-templated HA/BT ceramics
• Higher piezoelectric coefficient in porous HA/BT than that of the natural bone
• None cytotoxic effect and excellent in vitro biocompatibility in porous HA/BT

It was proposed that the piezoelectric effect played an important physiological role in bone growth, remodelling and fracture healing. An aligned porous piezoelectric composite scaffold was fabricated by freeze casting hydroxyapatite/barium titanate (HA/BT) suspensions. The highest compressive strength and lowest porosity of 14.5 MPa and 57.4% with the best parallelism of the pore channels were achieved in the HA10/BT90 composite. HA30/BT70 and HA10/BT90 composites exhibited piezoelectric coefficient d33 of 1.2 and 2.8 pC/N, respectively, both of which were higher than the piezoelectric coefficient of natural bone. Increase of the solid loading of the suspension and solidification velocity led to the improvement of piezoelectric coefficient d33. Meanwhile, double-templates resulted in the coexistence of lamellar pores and aligned macro-pores, exhibiting the ability to produce an oriented long-range ordered architecture. The manipulation flexibility of this method indicated the potential for customized needs in the application of bone substitute. An MTT assay indicated that the obtained scaffolds had no cytotoxic effects on L929 cells.

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