Mechanical and Morphological Analysis of Electrospun Poly(ε-Caprolactone) and Reduced Graphene Oxide Scaffolds for Tissue Engineering

Electrospinning has been widely applied to obtain nanofiber based biomaterials to be used as scaffolds in tissue engineering. The aim of this work is to obtain and characterize membranes of a composite material obtained by electrospinning of Poly(ε-caprolactone) (PCL) combined with reduced graphene oxide (rGO) 0.05% (PCLrGO005) and 0.5% (PCLrGO05) concentrations. Besides rGO concentration, the influence of electrospinning parameters was investigated (PCLrGO005M). The mechanical behavior of the new materials was studied considering the mechanical tensile test according to the ASTM D638 standard. Surface qualitative analysis was done by measuring fiber diameter using scanning microscopy. Four different membranes were obtained by random electrospinning using two needles and 5 mL volume solution at 18 kV, 15 cm needle distance and 0.033 mL/min flow rate or modified parameters of 15 kV, 10 cm needle distance and 0.012 mL/min flow rate. The modulus of elasticity, maximum load, tensile stress and strain were obtained for all membranes and analyzed by ANOVA. The morphological surface analysis of the scaffolds showed that the nanomaterial scaffolds of PCL and rGO with good mechanical properties and uniform surface morphology can be obtained by careful adjustments of electrospinning process parameters.