A polycaprolactone bio-nanocomposite bone substitute fabricated for femoral fracture approaches: Molecular dynamic and micro-mechanical Investigation

Abstract

The application of porous bio-nanocomposites polymer has greatly increased in the treatment of bone abnormalities and bone fracture. Therefore, predicting the mechanical properties of these bio-nanocomposites are very important prior to their fabrication. Investigation of mechanical properties like (elastic modulus and hardness) is very costly and time-consuming in experimental tests. Therefore, researchers have focused on mathematical methods and new theories to predict the artificial synthetic bone for orthopedic application. In this paper, porous bio-nanocomposites synthetic bone including nanocrystalline Hydroxyapatite (HA) nanoparticles and Titanium oxide (TiO2) containing (0 wt, 5 wt, 10 wt, and 15 wt of TiO2) as reinforcements and the biocompatible polycaprolactone (PCL) polymer as the matrix has been used for the fabrication of PCL-HA-TiO2. Then, the mechanical test was conducted on the samples and the extracted value of the experimental test was compared with the analytical model using molecular dynamics (MD) method. Finally, these properties were compared with the Dewey micromechanics theory, and the error rate between the experimental method and the Dewey theory was reported. It was found that as the porosity percentage increased in the sample three-phase in composites, the model has a higher error in this theory. Then, due to the importance of hydroxyapatite in the fabrication of bone scaffolds, the obtained results of mechanical properties (Elastic modulus and Poisson's ratio) have been analyzed statistically. The application of these equations in the rapid prediction of Elastic Modulus and Poisson's ratio of the synthetic bone scaffolds made of hydroxyapatite is highly recommended.