POROUS SHAPE MEMORY POLYMER NANOCOMPOSITES: SYNTHESIS, CHARACTERIZATION, AND POTENTIAL BIO-APPLICATION

Abstract

Porous shape memory polymers (SMPs) are the smart materials which attract significant interests in the fields such as aerospace, civil engineering, electrical engineering, and biomedical device. Porous SMPs have low recover stress, excellent recover strain, low density, and biocompatibility, making it a great potential candidate in the treatment of Intracranial Aneurysms (ICAs). In this thesis, pristine SMP foams, CNT/SMP nanocomposite foams, and 3D printed CNT/SMP nanocomposite scaffolds are synthesized and characterized. The pristine SMP foams have a porosity of 85.7% and a shear fracture around 90% of the strain, which have significantly higher elastic deformation at the temperature above glass transition temperature. Compared with the pristine SMP foams, CNT/SMP nanocomposite foams have good conductivity, which enables it to use joule-heating method to trigger the compressed foams to recover to the original shape in much less time. Using 3D printing technique to fabricate the CNT/SMP nanocomposite scaffolds has greatly reduced the manufacturing time from 120 hours to 30 minutes and can personalize the geometry of printed complex structures. Designing tunable configuration of electroactive CNT/SMP nanocomposites enables this study advantageous for the potential medical device design for treating the ICAs.