A Toolkit for Tailoring Ice-Templated Scaffold Structure

In this paper we prove for the first time the key link between scaffold architecture and latent heat evolution during the production of porous biomedical collagen structures using freeze drying. Collagen scaffolds are used widely in the biomedical industry for the repair and reconstruction of skeletal tissues and organs. Freeze drying of collagen slurries is an industry standard, and until now, literature has sought to characterize the influence of set processing parameters including the freezing protocol and weight percentage of collagen. However, we are able to demonstrate, by monitoring the local thermal events within the slurry during solidification, that nucleation, growth and annealing processes can be controlled, and therefore we are able to control the resulting scaffold architecture. Based on our correlation of thermal profile measurements with scaffold architecture we hypothesize that there is a universal link between the fundamental freezing of ice and the structure of scaffolds which suggests that this concept is not only applicable for collagen, but also for ceramics and pharmaceuticals. We present a toolkit of strategies for tailoring the ice templated scaffold structure.