Synthesis and characterization of zirconia filled sol-gel derived bio-glass for load-bearing bone implant material

Abstract

At present, clinical applications of bioactive glasses are only limited to those materials synthesized by the melting process. Glass melting process required high processing temperature which contributes to several weaknesses. Sol gel glass shows relatively low toughness and low compressive strength to be used especially in load bearing bone implant materials. Metal oxides, such as MgO,TiO2 and Al2O3 are added to glass to improve their physical-chemical properties. In this study we are using zirconia as the oxide phase. Potential used of zirconia in bioglass have not been widely studied. Its need more research and investigations before can be commercialized and accepted usage in clinical applications. In this study, we synthesized the SiO2 – CaO – P2O5 bioglass system using sol-gel method and compared their mechanical properties with effect addition of zirconia and different sintering temperature. The microstructure features resulting glass-zirconia was characterize by Field emission Scanning Electron Microscopy (FeSEM), Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy (EDS), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). Compressive strength is measured as mechanical properties. The result showed that increasing the temperature improved the shrinkage percentage of sample, the densification between the grains increase, the crystallization natural amorphous can be observed, the bond between zirconia and gel glass are detected and the phase obtain diffraction peak can confirmed the phase induced. The addition of zirconia can reduced the shrinkage percentage of the sample, the pores is reduced because filled by zirconia particles, the Silicon oxygen bond (Si-O-Si) formed and the compressive strength is increased as the addition of zirconia increased at both temperatures. Thus all the result supports the mechanical properties of the gel glass increase by increasing the addition amount of zirconia and increased sintering temperature.