Remotely actuated polymeric nanocomposites for biomedical applications

Thesis

The present work describes the synthesis, structural and mechanical characterisation of soft polymeric materials used for biomedical purposes.

This thesis is separated in two parts: the first one pays special attention to natural polymeric hydrogels for Tissue Engineering (TE) described in chapter 3 and chapter 4 describes the synthesis of magnetically responsive nanocomposite hydrogels for TE.

In this first part, I mainly focus on the mechanical characterisation of the synthesised materials. I use AFM microindentations to characterise them locally and oscillatory shear rheometry to characterise the bulk responses of the material, obtaining the reduced Young’s modulus (E*), the storage G′ and the loss G′′ modulus respectively. Furthermore, in chapter 3, the assessment of the stability of microbeads made of alginate for modular TE is described, followed by a novel magneto-mechanical coupling observed for the first time in chitosan hydrogels. In the 4th chapter, I characterise the mechanical response of a chitosan-Fe₃O₄ nanocomposite with an enhanced magneto-mechanical coupling.

The second part of this work (chapter 5) describes a simple synthesis of polymeric micro-ellipsoidal particles for torque generation assays in biomedicine. I characterise the rotation of these particles in comparison to commercially available spherical microparticles and their enhanced ability to follow low magnetic rotating fields.

Authors: Brunner, I

• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford