Rheological properties of injectable biomaterials

McLEMORE, Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center, USA 

Key words rheology, shrinkage, kinetics, swelling, evaporation, radio-opaque, solvent exchange, chemical gel. 

The role of statistics and uncertainty in rheological characterization. This section very briefly presents some statistical tools which may be useful in the characterization of rheological data for in situ gelling materials. 

Future trends. This section presents a short discussion of the trends and future directions in the field. 

We begin the discussion by defining the technique itself. Rheology is a branch of science concerned with the characterization of viscoelastic fluids. A more scientific definition of rheology is the study of materials which are not completely described by either classic Hookean mechanics, which describe solids, or Newton s law of viscosity, which describe liquids, but instead fall somewhere in-between. So, when we talk about the rheology of viscoelastic solids/liquids, what we mean is that we are monitoring the viscosity, elasticity, and other flow properties, and the change in those properties over time in the presence of stimuli. 

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Liu C, Shao H, Chen F, Zheng H. Rheological properties of concentrated aqueous injectable calcium phosphate cement slurry. Biomaterials. 2006 Oct 27(29) 5003-13. 

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