Mechanical properties of PLA/HA composite for Coronary Stent application by powder processing

Abstract

The risen in mortality cause by coronary heart disease (CAD) leads to intervention of procedure such as bypass surgery and percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) with or without stenting. Nevertheless, the idea of procedure to cure CAD is still under research and development. Under new research and development of coronary stent, it was found that the PLA-HA composite having suitable mechanical strength require by an ideal stent plus the biocompatibility of the stent itself potentially offer a better procedure to perform PCI compare with some bare metallic stent. Therefore, the objective of this project is to fabricate and analyze a new material, PLA-HA using powder processing include mixing and hot press and analyze using tensile test with Universal Testing Machine (UTM), hardness test and observe under magnification of scanning electron microscope (SEM). As a finding, fabrication of the new composite using powder processing is rather hard. Constrains that was found such as mixing ratio, mixing technique, hot press temperature. Although the results show that the it was unfavorable to fabricate the stent using the powder processing, recommendations on process parameter and technique was suggest to improve the mechanical strength of the composite in future work.