A permeability measurement system for tissue engineering scaffolds

A permeability measurement system is developed to quantify the inter-pore connectivity of tissue engineering scaffolds. It uses dry air as the fluid medium and allows rapid measurement operations. The paper analyses the fluid phenomena in porous structures, providing a theoretical background for the developed system. A nonlinear least-squares algorithm is developed to estimate the effective porosity, from which the intrinsic permeability is derived based on the mean pore size of the scaffold. It is shown that the flow in the measurement operations does not have to be within Darcy's region. The developed system can be used to characterize tissue engineering scaffolds with a wide range of permeability values.