Thermal expansion of blood vessels and muscle specimens permeated with DMSO, DP6, and VS55 at cryogenic temperatures.

As part of an ongoing effort to characterize the continuum mechanics during cryopreservation via vitrification (vitreous in Latin means glass), the current study focuses on measuring the thermal expansion of cryoprotective agents in the presence and absence of biological samples of bovine muscle and goat arteries. The cryoprotectants under investigation are 7.05 M DMSO, DP6, and VS55, with permeation time of up to 48 h. This study focuses on the upper part of the cryogenic temperature range, where the cryoprotectant behaves like a liquid in all practical applications. The specific lower boundary of this range is unique to the cryoprotectant composition and to the applied cooling rate. The measurement device used in the current study is a modification of a prototype presented recently, in which modifications are made to accommodate biological samples. Based on thermal strain observations, it is concluded that the presence of tissue samples promotes crystallization (the tissue samples serve as potential nucleation sites). It is shown in this study that the thermal strain of tissue samples permeated with 7.05 M DMSO and DP6 is no greater than the thermal expansion of the same cryoprotectants in the absence of tissue samples, and in some cases it is significantly less. For a given cryoprotectant in comparable thermal conditions, experiments on bovine muscle samples show significantly higher scattered data than experiments on artery samples.