A selective strategy for determining suitable structure and fatigue behavior study of minimal surface scaffolds fabricated by EBM

This work provides a selective strategy to determine structure shape and fatigue life suitable for implanted scaffolds, meeting the demands of long-term bone implantation. Scaffolds were designed by a novel mathe-matical method and fabricated by additive manufacturing EBM using Ti-6Al-4V. The failure mechanism of the scaffolds under high cycle fatigue was revealed by Micro-CT, FEA and SEM, which ensures the scaffolds have fatigue life >106 at stress level of 0.2. It was found scaffolds with larger unite size help to decrease notch sites for crack initiation, resulting in the improvement of fatigue life without reducing the porosity of scaffolds.

Automated summary

This work presents a selective strategy to determine the shape and fatigue life of implanted scaffolds, meeting the requirements of long-term bone implantation. Scaffolds were designed using a novel mathematical method and fabricated using additive manufacturing EBM with Ti-6Al-4V. The failure mechanism of the scaffolds under high cycle fatigue was investigated using Micro-CT, FEA, and SEM, and it was found that scaffolds with larger unit sizes can improve fatigue life without reducing the porosity.