AccScience Publishing / IJB / Online First / DOI: 10.36922/IJB025390401
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Early Access

Design and performance study of 3D-printed cross-scale metamaterial porous structures for orthopedic implants

Guoqing Zhang1* Junxin Li1 Congcong Shangguan2 Juanjuan Xie1 Yongsheng Zhou1 Aibing Huang3 Yuchao Bai4
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1 Department of Mechanical Design and Manufacturing, School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Zhoukou Normal University, Zhoukou, Henan, China
2 Veterinary Laboratory, Shangzhou District Animal Health Supervision Institute, Shangluo, Shaanxi, China
3 Department of Orthopedics, Taizhou People’s Hospital Affiliated to Nanjing Medical University, Taizhou, Jiangsu, China
4 School of Robotics and Advanced Manufacture, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen 518052, PR China
Received: 27 September 2025 | Accepted: 11 October 2025 | Published online: 14 October 2025
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Additive Manufacturing of Functional Biomaterials-Series2)
© 2025 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )
Abstract

To obtain bio-fixed implants with excellent performance, it is necessary to investigate the metamaterial properties of cross-scale (macroscale structure and microscale texture) porous structures. To this end, we employed parametric modeling to design porous structures; analyzed the flow field distribution of blood flowing through different multi-level porous structures using mold flow simulation; analyzed the compressive properties of porous structures using finite element simulation; assessed the biocompatibility of porous structures via animal experiments and acquired tissue ingrowth data within porous structures using Micro-CT. The results indicated that when fluid flowed through cross-scale porous structures, the overall pressure was low, the Kelvin Cell structure exhibited good flow field characteristics under low pressure. When the structure was pressurized, texturization methods involving material removal resulted in larger displacements, while those involving material addition resulted in smaller displacements. The Kelvin Cell structure exhibited extensive tissue ingrowth, with a dense tissue pattern inside, and the amount of ingrowth decreased from inside to outside; increasing the roughness of porous structures by material removal increased the surface-to-volume ratio to a certain extent, but did not favor tissue ingrowth, while increasing roughness by material addition favored tissue ingrowth, laying a foundation for the design of cross-scale metamaterial implants.

Keywords
3D printing
Porous structure
Metamaterial
Mechanical properties
Biocompatibility
Funding
The study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (52575470) and the Zhoukou Science and Technology Plan Project (ZKSKJGG 100084).
Conflict of interest
The authors report no conflicts of interest.
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International Journal of Bioprinting, Electronic ISSN: 2424-8002 Print ISSN: 2424-7723, Published by AccScience Publishing