Design of cellular porous biomaterials for wall shear stress criterion

The microfluidic environment provided by implanted prostheses has a decisive influence on the viability, proliferation and differentiation of cells. In bone tissue engineering, for instance, experiments have confirmed that a certain level of wall shear stress (WSS) is more advantageous to osteoblastic differentiation. This paper proposes a level-set-based topology optimization method to regulate fluidic WSS distribution for design of cellular biomaterials. The topological boundary of fluid phase is represented by a level-set model embedded in a higher-dimensional scalar function. WSS is determined by the computational fluid dynamics analysis in the scale of cellular base cells. To achieve a uniform WSS distribution at the solid-fluid interface, the difference between local and target WSS is taken as the design criterion, which determines the speed of the boundary evolution in the level-set model. The examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented method and exhibit a considerable potential in the design optimization and fabrication of new prosthetic cellular materials for bioengineering applications. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2010;107:737-746.