Radial Compressive Property and the Proof-of-Concept Study for Realizing Self-expansion of 3D Printing Polylactic Acid Vascular Stents with Negative Poisson's Ratio Structure

Biodegradable stents offer the potential to reduce the in-stent restenosis by providing support long enough for the vessel to heal. The polylactic acid (PLA) vascular stents with negative Poisson's ratio (NPR) structure were manufactured by fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printing in this study. The effects of stent diameter, wall thickness and geometric parameters of arrowhead NPR structure on radial compressive property of 3D-printed PLA vascular stent were studied. The results showed that the decrease of stent diameter, the increase of wall thickness and the increase of the surface coverage could enhance the radial force (per unit length) of PLA stent. The radial and longitudinal size of PLA stent with NPR structure decreased simultaneously when the stent was crimped under deformation temperature. The PLA stent could expand in both radial and longitudinal direction under recovery temperature. When the deformation temperature and recovery temperature were both 65 °C, the diameter recovery ratio of stent was more than 95% and the maximum could reach 98%. The length recovery ratio was above 97%. This indicated the feasibility of utilizing the shape memory effect (SME) of PLA to realize the expansion of 3D-printed PLA vascular stent under temperature excitation.