Degradation Behavior In Vitro of Carbon Nanotubes (CNTs)/Poly(lactic acid) (PLA) Composite Suture

Polymers

Peng Wang¹  Yao Zhang¹  Shuqiang Liu¹  Xiaofang Zhang¹  Mingfang Liu¹  Gaihong Wu¹  Juanjuan Yu¹  Xiaogang Chen² 

[1] College of Textile Engineering, Taiyuan University of Technology, Taiyuan 030024, China;School of Materials, The University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK;

关键词: poly(lactic acid);    carbon nanotubes;    degradation behavior;    composite suture;   

DOI  :  10.3390/polym11061015

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Poly(lactic acid) (PLA) suture can be absorbed by the human body, and so have wide applications in modern surgery operations. The degradation period of PLA suture is expected to meet with the healing time of different types of wounds. In order to control the degradation period of the PLA suture, the carbon nanotubes (CNTs) were composited with PLA suture, and the degradation experiment in vitro was performed on sutures. The structure and properties of sutures during degradation, such as surface morphology, breaking strength, elongation, mass and chemical structure, were tracked and analyzed. The results indicated that the degradation brought about surface defects and resulted in 13.5 weeks for the strength valid time of the original PLA suture. By contrast, the strength valid time of the CNTs/PLA suture was increased to 26.6 weeks. Whilst the toughness of both the pure PLA and CNTs/PLA sutures decreased rapidly and almost disappeared after 3 to 4 weeks of degradation. The mass loss demonstrated that the time required for complete degradation of the two sutures was obviously different, the pure PLA suture 49 weeks, while CNTs/PLA sutures 63 to 73 weeks. The research proved that CNTs delayed PLA degradation and prolonged its strength valid time in degradation.

【 授权许可】

Unknown