Design and Modeling of Cellular Solids

Project description:

This project is concerned with the design, modeling, and manufacturing of cellular solids with a controlled and reproducible porous architecture. Porous structures with a controlled architecture, and hence controlled properties, have important applications in the fields of rapid manufacturing, lightweight design, and tissue engineering:

  • Rapid Manufacturing incorporates additive fabrication techniques such as Stereolithography (SLA), Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) and Selective Laser Melting. These are key technologies as they allow producing controlled porous structures. Conversely, rapid manufacturing can benefit from adding controlled porosity to large solid parts, as this may reduce material consumption and processing time.
  • In lightweight applications, controlled porous structures are useful for optimizing for example the specific stiffness or specific strength of a material. In addition, the modeling involved in generating porous structures may improve the understanding of the behavior of irregular porous materials such as foam.
  • Tissue Engineering often involves the use of tissue engineering scaffolds, which are carrier structures for selected cell populations that should be supportive of the desired tissue regeneration process by a combination of proper material selection, scaffold design and production, functionalization, and quantitative in vitro and in vivo screening in relevant environments. This work focuses on bone tissue engineering, and specifically on the design of bone scaffolds to be used in therapies for healing large or non-healing bone defects. Controlled, reproducible functionalized bone scaffolds may on the short term assist the experimental identification and quantification of structural parameters that govern cell culture, and on the longer term improve the success rate of bone healing therapies.

Aims:

The general aims of this project are:

  • To establish a knowledge base addressing the behavior of cellular solids from a multidisciplinary perspective.
  • To develop cost-effective methods and algorithms for generating bone scaffolds in a controlled way.
  • To determine how these methods and algorithms can be integrated in an intelligent design tool with methods for geometrical analysis, numerical modeling and rapid manufacturing.
  • To validate the geometrical variability and mechanical properties of produced bone scaffolds that are designed by the provided methods.

Researchers and research groups:

The research is performed by Maarten Moesen, who is part of

  • Prometheus - The division of Skeletal Tissue Engineering - Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
  • Composite Materials Group - Department of Metallurgy and Materials Engineering (MTM) - Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

The scientific promotors of this project are:

  • dr. Jan Schrooten - Prometheus, MTM (Bone scaffolds and tissue engineering)
  • Prof. dr. Ignaas Verpoest - Composite Materials group @ MTM (Lightweight applications and foams)
  • Prof. dr. Stepan V. Lomov - Composite Materials group @ MTM (Lightweight applications and foams)

Industrial promotors:

The following companies are involved in the guidance of this project:

Acknowledgements:

  • The Computational Geometry Algorithms Library (CGAL) was vital for the development of various methods in this project. To our experience, CGAL is a high quality C++ library providing support for dealing with a broad range of geometrical problems in several generic packages. CGAL packages of particular interest for this work have been the 3D Surface mesh generator, 2D constrained Delaunay Triangulation, 3D Polyhedral surfaces and 3D Nef Polyhedra.

Funding and project details:

This project is funded by the Institute for the Promotion of Innovation through Science and Technology in Flanders (IWT Vlaanderen)

Project number: IWT/OZM/080436

Start date: 01/04/2009

Duration: 2 years

Publications:

  • Implicit function-based design of regular bone scaffolds, M. Moesen, G. Kerckhofs, S. Van Bael, S.V. Lomov, I. Verpoest, J. Schrooten - International conference on tissue engineering (ICTE 2009), Leiria, Portugal, 9-11 July 2009