New Generation of Glass Materials for Biomedical Applications: Properties, Structure, Bioactivity, and Viability

Abstract

The limited strength of bioglasses has confined their application to non-load-bearing contexts, thus necessitating enhancements in their mechanical properties. A viable approach to surmount this hurdle involves integrating nitrogen into the silicate network of the glass. This outlines the effect of nitrogen addition in bioglasses of the system SiO2-Na2O-CaO. The purpose is to determine the effects of nitrogen addition on the physical and mechanical properties and the structure of oxynitride bioglasses based on the system Na2O-CaO-SiO2-Si3N4. Properties were all observed to increase linearly with nitrogen content. These increases are consistent with N in the glass structure in 3‐fold coordination with silicon and extra cross‐linking of the glass network. These increases are consistent with the incorporation of N into the glass structure in three-fold coordination with silicon with result in extra cross-linking of the glass network.