• tissue engineering
• melt electrospinning writing
• hydrogels
• fiber reinforcement
• biomimetics
• articular cartilage

Hydrogels are applied in the tissue engineering field due to their high-water content and close structural analogy to the extracellular matrix. However, their limited mechanical properties hamper their use in load-bearing applications. The goal of my thesis project was to reinforce GelMA-HAMA hybrid hydrogel and alginate hydrogel with porous 3D meshes made of melt electrospun medical grade poly (ε-caprolactone) (mPCL) fibres and to analyse the mechanical properties of the mesh-gel constructs in order to develop structures which could mimic the structurally graded properties of the cartilage tissue, controlling pore size and the architecture of the meshes. It was recently shown that transient mechanical properties of fibre-reinforced gels can be captured using FEA tools. FEA helps finding optimum architectures of the reinforcing meshes (pore size and fibre diameter) for a given gel type, thereby we can mimic the zonal mechanical properties of the tissue in the design stage. First, polymer concentration and crosslinking degree of the gel was optimized and then the gel and the reinforcing meshes were fabricated. Mechanical tests were performed to evaluate the mechanical properties of the meshes, hydrogels and fibre-reinforced hydrogels and they will be validated with values obtained with FEA tools. FE-SEM and Microscopy images were also produced.