Heterogeneous porous scaffold design using the continuous transformations of triply periodic minimal surface models

A novel and efficient method for designing a heterogeneous porous scaffold with continuous gradients in internal pore architectures is presented. Our method uses a hybrid method which combines radial basis functions (RBFs) interpolation scheme with the triply periodic minimal surface (TPMS) transformation strategy. In the method, a three-dimensional (3D) scalar field is defined implicitly as a single smooth architecture distribution function fitted to the given discrete architecture types of some chosen control points. Robust and efficient methods for fitting and evaluating RBFs allow us to design a variety of heterogeneous scaffolds with accurately controlled architecture distribution while maintaining fully interconnected pore networks. Experimental results show that the proposed scaffold design method has the potential benefits for precisely controlling the internal pore architectures within an arbitrarily shaped scaffold while preserving the advantages of distance field and TPMS-based pore architectures.