When I have prepared porous scaffold biomaterials, I want to know if these pores interconnect well. But what method should I use to measure them?
Hello Qun-Li Rao,
Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) could be a good method if your material can tolerate electron beams. If you can give more details about your material, and possibly a schematic diagram of its structure, I think, you will get good suggestions.
In SEM you can not get whether the pores are interconnected or closed. You can only get it by BET method..
A picture is worth a thousand words. I attach here a page showing SEM micrographs of interconnected bio-scaffolding structures from a well-cited publication. These seem to justify my suggestion.
I am curious to know why "in SEM you cannot get whether the pores are interconnected or closed", and what is BET method that enables to reveal them.
Simply, you can use fluid permeability test to measure how well your porous media have open or interconnected pores. Please let me know if you need standards related to these non-destructive tests.
Imaging techniques like XMCT (X-ray Micro Computed Tomography) also could be useful to obtain full detail of internal structure and knowing whether pore are open or closed in almost any sections of porous network.
Both SEM and BET may be used for your desire, but first one provides 2D and thus not much more reliable graphs to diagnose, and the second one should be mainly used to analyze the specific surface are (surface to volume) of structure of course where the fluid can penetrate.
Please let me know if you need further details or references.
I don't know from this images how people are calculating interconnected pores. BET , permeability test (Based on Darcy's Law) and Mercury porosimetry (if there is no limitation of pore size) are very well established. These processes are well established and used by P/M people for long time.
In principle, one can visualize the pores and their agglomerates in TEM with stereomicroscopy. This requires that the samples prior thinning are infiltrated. However, there is no information on the statistics.
Thank Sir.I really need the details of permeability test. I have taken SEM photographs. But they reflect the interconnection of pores only in 2D, not in depth.
I think the best way to investigate pore interconnectivity (i.e. to get a 3d image) is to do something like x-ray tomography. This will take slices of information in 2d and stitch them to obtain a 3d image. So you can get the depth of pores, etc. It is commonly used as a non-invasive technique for investigating quality of geological rocks, fossils, gemstones. A cheaper way to imitate that would be to do stitch 2d SEM images from different depths to get a pseudo 3d image (probably what some others have also suggested). Hope this helps.
I think the SEM observations are inadequate for determining to pore interconnectivity since it allows us to observe just submicron depths of the materials surface. Micro-CT could be a best method but it depends on your materials type because some polymeric structures do not exhibit good resolutions. On the other hand, the mercury porosimeter gives some clues about the pore size and the interconnectivity but it has been reported that this method is too rough and the accuracy and the validity of the method may vary according to material dimensions. BET is an another technique but widely used for surface area calculations although it yields clues about porosity. In conclusion, to my way of thinking the technique should be determined considering the material type and dimensions.
Here I attached an article that most probably will benefit you.
Best Regards,
Article Nondestructive Technique for the Characterization of the Por...
Micro CT is the best way to see the inter-connectivity of the pores in the porous scaffold
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