Preparation of polymeric foams with a pore size gradient via Thermally Induced Phase Separation (TIPS)

Abstract Foams with a pore size gradient are promising materials for tissue engineering applications where a complex architecture involving morphological variations in space must be mimicked, e.g. in bone tissue repair. In this paper, a technique to obtain a porous scaffold with a pore size gradient is presented. The preparation procedure is based on Thermally Induced Phase Separation (TIPS), by imposing a different thermal history on the two sides of a polymeric solution. In this way, a gradient in thermal history is produced, which will generate a pore size monotonously varying along scaffold thickness. By controlling some parameters easy to manipulate, such as demixing temperature and/or residence time in the miscibility gap region, the pore size range can be easily tuned.