Porous ceramic bodies with interconnected pore channels by a novel freeze casting technique

Porous ceramic bodies with interconnected pore channels were fabricated by a novel freeze casting technique using camphenebased slurries. The pore channels are surrounded by almost fully dense walls and have nearly circular cross-sections. The pore volume fraction and the channel size were controllable by the solid content in the slurry. The channels are replicas of entangled dendrites of frozen camphene, which sublimed during the freeze-drying process. This porous structure with entangled pore channels is considered potentially useful in many applications such as implantable bone scaffolds.