2024 AIChE Annual Meeting

(466a) Fluid Flow Enhancement through Porous Scaffolds Utilizing Bijel-Templated Materials

Authors

Thorson, T., Iowa State University
Botvinick, E. L., University of California, Irvine
Mohraz, A., University of California
The efficient design of microporous scaffolds has become pivotal in advancing materials used in many engineering applications, such as tissue engineering, drug delivery, batteries, and catalytic systems. Achieving facile fluid flow and mass transport in these scaffolds is crucial for enhancing the efficiency and functionality of the systems in which they are employed. Traditional methods of creating porous materials, while diverse and relatively simple, often result in limitations that impede fluid flow, including dead ends, inaccessible voids, and pore constrictions. Increasing porosity can mitigate some of these limitations but negatively impacts the scaffold’s mechanical properties. To address these challenges, we study the use of bicontinuous interfacially jammed emulsion gels (bijels) as templates for creating porous materials with enhanced permeability and compare them to particle-templated materials (PTMs), a common method of producing porous architectures.

Our research demonstrates the microstructural advantages of bijel-templated materials (BTMs) over traditional PTMs. We use a combined experimental/computational approach to show how the intrinsic microstructural advantages of BTMs, including their continuous domains devoid of dead ends and constrictions, present enhanced fluid transport capability without sacrificing structural integrity. These claims are substantiated through rigorous permeability testing and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations, across different scaffold architectures. These findings demonstrate that the unique microstructure of their pores is more conducive to fluid flow, which more than compensates for the lower porosity. Our CFD simulations not only corroborate our experimental results but also enable a deeper understanding of the fluid dynamics within these porous scaffolds, as well as the microstructural origins of enhanced permeability in bijel-templated systems.

Our study not only challenges conventional limitations of porous scaffold design but also paves the way for the development of materials with optimized permeability for a myriad of applications. By harnessing the unique properties of bijel-templated materials, we offer a scalable, efficient solution to enhance fluid transport in porous scaffolds, potentially revolutionizing fields such as biomedical engineering, energy storage, and environmental remediation.