Bio-Inspired design of a porous resorbable scaffold for bone reconstruction: a preliminary study

The study and imitation of the biological and mechanical systems present in nature and living beings always have been sources of inspiration for improving existent technologies and establishing new ones. Pursuing this line of thought, we consider an artificial graft typical in the bone reconstruction surgery with the same microstructure of the bone living tissue and examine the interaction between these two phases, namely bone and the graft material. Specifically, a visco-poroelastic second gradient model is adopted for the bone-graft composite system to describe it at a macroscopic level of observation. The second gradient formulation is employed to consider possibly size effects and as a macroscopic source of interstitial fluid flow, which is usually regarded as a key factor in bone remodeling. With the help of the proposed formulation and via a simple example, we show that the model can be used as a graft design tool. As a matter of fact, an optimization of the characteristics of the implant can be carried out by numerical investigations. In this paper, we observe that the size of the graft considerably influences the interaction between bone tissue and artificial bio-resorbable material and the possibility that the bone tissue might substitute more or less partially the foreign graft for better bone healing.