*2.1. Scaffold Manufacturing*

The LPBF (Laser Powder Bed Fusion) experiments were performed on an AconityMINI system designed by Aconity3D (Herzogenrath, Germany), which is specifically developed for laboratory use. This system is characterized by an adapted gas flow management to remove the resulting process fume for materials with low melting and evaporating temperature (i.e., zinc: 692 K, 1180 K). These materials tend to produce a large amount of process fume during manufacture. The beam source is a single-mode fiber laser (wavelength of 1064 nm) with up to 400 W of power output. Samples were manufactured on a zinc baseplate using a bidirectional scanning strategy with 90° rotations between consecutive layers. The energy input during exposure was controlled by the selected process parameters (laser power (*PL*), layer thickness (*Ds*), scanning speed (*vs*), and hatch distance (Δ*ys*)). The volume energy density (*EV*) was calculated as followed [33]:

$$E\_V = \frac{P\_L}{D\_S v\_s \Delta y\_s} \tag{1}$$

Within the scope of this work, all AM scaffolds were manufactured with a constant layer thickness of 30 μm and *EV* was set for all scaffolds to 133 J/mm3. The scaffolds were afterwards sandblasted with 2.5 bar, to remove adhering powder particles.
