An overview on degradation of biopolymeric scaffolds and the effect on their mechanical properties

Abstract

In this work we present a brief review of the different methodologies developed to simulate the amorphous polymers fixation devices submitted to hydrolytic degradation. A numerical implementation of the Reaction-diffusion equations proposed by Wang is performed in FreeFem++. We also present a numerical program which performs successive chain scissions in order to obtain the average Young modulus for a scaffold. Afterwards, the young modulus is represented versus the number average molecular weight. The resulting expression is used in the Reactiondiffusion model in order to obtain the Young Modulus distribution inside a scaffold unit. The resulting distribution can be used as an input to simulate further mechanical loads on the device at different degradation times.