Journal of Inorganic Materials

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Preparation of Porous Scaffolds of Borosilicate Bioglass

LIU Xin1, YAO Ai-Hua1, WANG De-Ping1, HUANG Wen-Hai1, FU Hai-Luo1, ZHAO Di1, LU Wei-Jia2, PAN Hao-Bo2   

  1. 1. Institute of Bioengineering and Information Technology Materials, School of Material Science and Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China; 2. Faculty of Medicine, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong 999077, China
  • Received:2007-04-24 Revised:2007-06-22 Published:2008-03-20 Online:2008-03-20

Abstract: A borosilicate bioglass in Na2O-CaO-SiO2-P2O5-B2O3 system is a bioactive and biodegradable material for tissue engineering. In this study, the bioactive porous scaffolds with three-dimensional interconnection were fabricated by replication technique, using borosilicate bioglass powder to form slurry with ethanol as solvent and ethyl-cellulose as additive. The compressive strength of scaffolds increases from 0.03MPa to 0.36MPa by adjusting the slurry load, the solid concentration and the ethyl-cellulose concentration in the slurry, while the pore size of scaffolds remains in the rangeot 300--500μm and the porosity maintains over 80%. According the analysis on Cellular Structure Model, it is suggested that employing high strength glass and optimizing slurry composition are effective approaches to improve cellular structure and increase scaffold strength. The compressive strength of another borosilicate glass scaffolds made from Na2O-K2O-MgO-CaO-SiO2-P2O5-B2O3 system can reach 5--8MPa based on the theory. These experiments show that the replication technique is a promising way to prepare bioglass scaffolds.

Key words: replication technique, borosilicate bioglass, scaffolds, slurry

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