A Novel Technique to Prepare Porous 3D Fluoridated Hydroxyapatite Scaffold Using Pore-forming and Foaming Agents

A novel technology using pore-forming agent and foaming agent was developed to prepare multi-porous fluoridate hydroxyapatite scaffolds. With this technology, scaffolds were produced with uniform and highly inter- connected pores in which large pores containing small ones on their walls distributing along 3-dimension. First, the precursor, FHA powder, was prepared by chemical precipitation method. Then it was used to form scaffold through heat treatments by adding ammonium bicarbonate as foaming agent and polymethyl methacrylate as pore-forming agent, and a dense frame of multi-porous structure was obtained. Investigated by X-ray diffraction (XRD), a dual-phase of FHA/β-TCP in scaffold was confirmed. The uniform morphology in scaffolds and the pore size dis- tribution of large pores (100-400 µm) containing small ones (10~50 µm) were demonstrated by SEM images. HA and β-TCP were also used to prove the universality of this method. Furthermore, the pore formation and its mecha-