TÜBİTAK 3501 Project Achievement from Our Department – Dr. Enes Durgut
The project to be carried out by Dr. Enes Durgut, a faculty member of our department, has been awarded funding under the TÜBİTAK 3501 Career Development Program. Dr. Betül Aldemir Dikici and Dr. Nihan Şengökmen-Özsöz will contribute to the project as researchers, particularly in the characterization studies.
The project aims to develop a novel method for producing dual-scale porous structures using polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB), a biodegradable semicrystalline polymer. In this context, thermally induced phase separation (TIPS) and emulsion templating (ET) techniques will be combined for the first time within a single process, enabling the fabrication of three-dimensional monoliths featuring pores at both ~1 µm and 30–150 µm scales.
The originality of the proposed method lies in:
(1) enabling the transformation of PHB into controlled pore morphologies that are difficult to achieve through conventional techniques,
(2) being feasible with minimal infrastructure requirements, and
(3) providing a platform adaptable to other semicrystalline polymers.
The resulting porous structures are expected to serve as promising functional materials for tissue engineering, environmental applications, and advanced materials development. Dr. Enes Durgut stated that through this project, they aim to introduce a new approach in which phase-separation mechanisms are utilized simultaneously with emulsion templating, thereby addressing a significant gap in the literature regarding the controlled fabrication of porous biopolymer structures.