Porous gelatin hydrogels by gas-in-liquid foam templating

Abstract

In the present work, porous gelatin scaffolds were prepared by insufflating an inert gas ( argon) inside a concentrated solution of gelatin in the presence of a suitable polymeric surfactant in association with sodium dodecyl sulfate. The implementation of such an approach involved the design and manufacturing of a specially dedicated reactor. Foams were prepared at a temperature of 50 degrees C and then let gel at 4 degrees C. After purification, they were auto-cross-linked with EDC and freeze-dried. The scaffolds synthesised with this technique present a morphology characterised by pores of spherical symmetry highly interconnected by a plurality of interconnections and, as a consequence, are particularly suited for cell culturing. The dosage of the volume of the insufflated gas permits to modulate the scaffold pore and interconnect dimensions. In this way matrices characterised by void and interconnect average diameters ranging from 250 to 360 mu m and from 80 to 150 mu m, respectively, can be successfully obtained

Computed microtomography and mechanical property analysis of soy protein porous hydrogel prepared by homogenizing and microbial transglutaminase cross-linking

“…Solid, liquid and gas templates are used for creating porosity in hydrogels, e.g. silica particles (Serizawa, Uemura, Kaneko, & Akashi, 2002), ice crystal (Kang, Tabata, & Ikada, 1999), sodium chloride (Cheng, Zhang, & Zhuo, 2003), organic solvents (Kabiri, Omidian, & ZohuriaanMehr, 2003;Tokuyama & Kanehara, 2007), surfactants (Partap, Muthutantri, Rehman, Davis, & Darr, 2007), bicarbonate (Caykara, Küçüktepe, & Turan, 2007), supercritical CO 2 (Tsioptsias, Paraskevopoulos, Christofilos, Andrieux, & Panayiotou, 2011) and inert gas (Barbetta, Rizzitelli, Bedini, Pecci, & Dentini, 2010). In these studies, synthetic polymers were often employed as the matrix of hydrogels.…”

Preparation and yielding behavior of pendular network suspensions

“…Specifically, the very simple method-"add liquid and mix"-of realizing a yield stress offers a convenient way of stabilizing a structure temporarily before it can be made permanent, e.g., by sintering or crosslinking [15]. Furthermore, open pore morphologies can be realized readily in such systems [9,[16][17][18] with immediate relevance to applications in which chemical transport or fluid retention must be combined with mechanical strength. Indeed applications to materials science are not restricted to suspensions with capillary forces-a diverse set of particle/fluid/liquid mixtures can, depending on the materials and composition, yield a variety morphologies of potential interest to materials science [15], including Pickering emulsions [8,19], particle-stabilized foams [20][21][22], bijels [18,23], wet granular materials [1,24,25], and liquid marbles [26,27].…”

Soft Collagen-Gelatine Sponges by Convection Drying

“…This was higher than the pore sizes found for freeze-dried collagen sponges (Fig. 5C) or for gelatine sponges (Hajosch et al 2010;Barbetta et al 2010). One of the most important criteria of surgical sponges is the absorption time (ta) of aqueous liquids.…”