Identification of Shear Modulus of Gelatin Blended with Carboxymethylcellulose Scaffolds Using Curve Fitting Method from Compressive Test

Biopolymer scaffolds which made from various ratios of gelatin blended with carboxymethylcellulose (CMC) were studied. The scaffolds were fabricated to porous structure via freeze drying process and crosslinked to induce conjugation of free amide and carboxyl groups in protein structures by using thermal crosslinking techniques. The mechanical properties of the scaffolds were characterized by experimental procedure. In order to evaluate the modeling, we described the stress-strain behavior of the scaffolds by fitting the data to a neo-Hookean model. Results shown that models which evaluated CMC blended gelatin scaffold in the ratio of 80 and 20 of gelatin and CMC occurred in the highest average in shear modulus which was 11.46 kPa compared to other blended scaffolds. Gelatin scaffold with 10, 30 and 40% of CMC showed dramatically decreased in the shear modulus which were 2.12, 1.73 and 0.85 kPa, respectively compared to pure gelatin scaffold with significant different. These results showed the possibility of using CMC as a low cost material to combine with biopolymers for using in tissue engineering applications.