Yielding behaviors of polymeric scaffolds with implications to tissue engineering

Polymers are amongst the main candidate materials for load bearing tissue engineering scaffolds. Their effective and reliable clinical uses necessitate insightful analyses of the nonlinear characteristics, which has so far received little attention in literature. To better understand the failure characteristics of these porous structures, yielding behaviors of scaffolds made of a commercial photopolymer (RGD720) were studied using experiments and finite element method (FEM). The polymer exhibits substantial softening under uniaxial material test, but the extent of such softening behavior in a scaffold structure is compromised or even eliminated due to the internal non-uniformity of material yielding. [Display omitted] •Introduction of polymeric scaffolds fabricated by additive manufacturing.•Yielding behaviors of scaffolds made of commercial photopolymer were studied by using experiments and finite element method.•FEA results were in good agreement with those of the experimental results.•Demonstration von Mises criterion was a reliable prediction of the nonlinear behaviors of scaffold structures.