Abstract

Calcium-phosphate based glasses and glass-ceramics play a crucial role in the tissue engineering development. Apart from their high biocompatibility and excellent ability to undergo varying degrees of resorbability1, they exhibit relatively high bioactivity and due to that they are commonly used as bone and dental implants. A substantial research effort is devoted to improve calcium-phosphate materials physico-chemical properties by tuning their degree of crystallinity and doping them with metal ions is one of the mostly researched strategies. The results found in the literature show that synthesized CaOP2O5-Nb2O5 compounds exhibit a good biocompatibility, very low cytotoxicity in respect to calciumphosphate doped with other metals and additionally can enhance human osteoblast function2,3. As of today structure of these materials is not thoroughly described. Therefore, the detailed structural investigation by means of spectroscopic studies, i.e. FTIR spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, XAFS spectroscopy, XPS and EDX, together with SEM imaging, XRD and BET surface area measurements, was realized to shed light on the relationship between materials structure and the presence of dopant. In this work, we show the results obtained for bioactive glass-ceramics, prepared via simple sol-gel method, with Ca/(P+Nb) molar ratio equal to 1.5 and with relative Nb contents of 0 mol% and 10 mol% of P. XRD patterns analysis shows that samples consist of tricalcium phosphate and hydroxyapatite phase. Raman spectra analysis confirms the incorporation of Nb into the material structure. Moreover, niobium doping leads to an increase in degree of crystallinity and crystallite size of the sample. Stoichiometry of the ceramics is as intended. Additionally, there is a greater proportion of carbonate groups in the doped material than in the undoped one (FTIR, Raman spectroscopy), and all samples exhibit calcium deficiency on the surface (XPS). XAFS analysis shows presence of octahedral coordination of niobium ions, with average oxidation state around +4.5 and XPS analysis indicates that on the sample surface the contribution of Nb+5 ions is greater than Nb+4 ions. Additionally it can be concluded, that Nb accumulates on materials surface.

Authors (3)