Sensor-based degradation monitoring for the evaluation of (bio)degradable polymers

Abstract

Biodegradable polymers play an essential role in today’s biomedical research and clinical practice. Their ability to degrade under physiological conditions has led to numerous applications including resorbable implants, scaffolds for tissue engineering and controllable carrier matrices for drug delivery systems. Although some polymers have already made an tremendous impact for such applications, they still have drawbacks. Therefore, there is a need for new (bio)degradable polymers with controlled and predicted degradability. Due to the complexity and variety of parameters influencing the degradation process, detailed studies and improvements on polymer materials require a large number of samples to be analyzed. In order to increase the efficiency of the design process of novel polymers, simple, non-destructive, fast and inexpensive analyzing techniques for real-time in situ monitoring of the degradation process are advantageous. This thesis focuses on the design and development of a chip-based sensor system for monitoring polymer (bio)degradation. The system is designed comprising sensor structures for degradation monitoring as well as for control of temperature, pH value and conductivity of the medium in which the degradation process takes place. In order to facilitate extensive studies on numerous samples in parallel and in real-time, the used transducer principles feature an electrical read-out of the signals for all sensors.