Development and performance study of biomedical porous zinc scaffold manufactured by using additive manufacturing and microwave sintering

Zinc (Zn) and its alloys are gaining popularity day by day in biomedical applications due to their acceptable biocompatibility and moderate degradation rate than magnesium and iron. However, the fabrication procedure for the metallic scaffold is still a challenging task. Hence, the present study aims to establish a new manufacturing route for fabricating Zn scaffold utilizing 3D printing and microwave sintering. The Central composite design (CCD) methodology was used to investigate the influence of sintering parameters like sintering temperature (St), heating rate (Hr), and soaking duration (Sd) on the compressive strength (C.S) & sintered density (S.D) values of the fabricated sample. It was found that the value of C.S and S.D increased with an increase in soaking duration and heating rate. Similar to Hr and Sd, C.S and S.D values increased with increasing sintering temperature, but the values of both properties declined after a critical temperature. Multi-objective optimization was performed utilizing Genetic algorithm (GA) methodology, a tool of MATLAB to obtain the optimum values of process input factors for maximum C.S (18.6MPa) and S.D (6.79 gm/cm(3)). In the end, a comparative study of the Zn scaffold was performed to evaluate the performance of developed fabrication method, and results were found satisfactory.