Shuai Liu

By Shuai Liu, Rurong Lin, Chunyi Pu, Jianxing Huang, Jie Zhang and Honghao Hou

Nanocomposites are materials that are usually created by introducing appropriate nanoparticles into a macroscopic matrix, enabling the resulting bulk nanocomposites remarkable characteristics in electrical, thermal conductivity, mechanical, optical, magnetic properties, and so on. Such nanocomposite materials are of great importance for biomedical applications, particularly promising for tissue engineering scaffolds. Recent trends in the nanocomposites field show bio-based/environmentally friendly materials to be among the components in these nanocomposite materials. Particular attention has been paid to the use of bio-based/biodegradable polymers as a matrix component in nanocomposite applications, because of their great widespread potential and advantages over other traditional synthetic materials. In this chapter, we focus on the current research trends of the tissue engineering scaffolds based on nanocomposite materials and mainly introduce the properties, types, manufacturing techniques, and tissue engineering applications of various nanocomposite biomaterials. Besides, challenges and prospects associated with nanocomposite biomaterials for the tissue engineering field were discussed. We believe that this chapter provides a new envision for building functional nanocomposite materials for broad biomedical applications.

Part of the book: Nanocomposite Materials for Biomedical and Energy Storage Applications