Fabrication of 3D scaffolds based on fully biobased unsaturated polyester resins by microstereo-lithography

Abstract

Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies are an effective route to fabricate tailor made scaffolds for tissue engineering (TE) and regenerative medicine with microstereo-lithography (µSLA) being one of the most promising techniques to produce high quality 3D structures. Here, we report the crosslinking studies of fully biobased unsaturated polyesters (UPs) with 2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate (HEMA) as the unsaturated monomer (UM), using thermal and µSLA crosslinking processes. The resulting resins were fully characterized in terms of their thermal and mechanical properties. Determination of gel content, water contact angle (WCA), topography and morphology analysis by atomic force microscopy (AFM) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) were also performed. The results show that the developed unsaturated polyester resins (UPRs) have promising properties for µSLA. In vitro cytotoxicity assays performed with 3T3-L1 cell lines showed that the untreated scaffolds exhibited a maximum cellular viability around 60 %, which was attributed to the acidic nature of the UPRs. The treatment of the UPRs and scaffolds with ethanol (EtOH) improved the cellular viability to 100%. The data presented in this manuscript contribute to improve the performance of biobased unsaturated polyesters in additive manufacturing.

The Evolution and Future Trends of Unsaturated Polyester Biocomposites: A Bibliometric Analysis

“…Increasing the use of bio-based matrices in the production of UPR biocomposites. Some of the research cited in this study [67,68,120] have investigated this line of inquiry, but it has the potential to grow in the next years, especially given the alternative of inserting natural components during UPR polymerization. Alternatives have been studied further in various polymer matrices [14], as well as in other thermo-set matrices, such as the bio-based epoxy resin [121].…”