Acoustical and poromechanical characterisation of titanium scaffolds for biomedical applications

Biocompatible materials are designed so as to mimic biological materials such as bone as closely as possible. As regards the mechanical aspect of bone replacement materials, a certain stiffness and strength are mandatory to effectively carry the loads imposed on the skeleton. In this paper, porous titanium with different porosities, produced on the basis of metal powder and space holder components, is investigated as bone replacement material. For the determination of mechanical properties, i.e. strength of dense and porous titanium samples, two kinds of experiments were performed - uniaxial and triaxial tests. The triaxial tests were of poromechanical nature, i.e. oil was employed to induce the same pressure both at the lateral surfaces of the cylindrical samples and inside the pores. The stiffness properties were revealed by acoustic (ultrasonic) tests. Different frequencies give access to different stiffness components (stiffness tensor components related to high-frequency-induced bulk waves versus Young's moduli related to low-frequency-induced bar waves), at different observation scales; namely, the observation scale the dense titanium with around 100 mu m characteristic length (characterised through the high frequencies) versus that of the porous material with a few millimetres of characteristic length (characterised through the low frequencies). Finally, the experimental results were used to develop and validate a poro-micromechanical model for porous titanium, which quantifies material stiffness and strength from its porosity and (in the case of the aforementioned triaxial tests) its pore pressurisation state.