Bioactive Glasses

Goal: Oxide glasses are excellent bioactive materials. Most bioactive glasses are found within the ternary soda-lime silicate. These systems are known to have a relatively slow interaction with the physiological fluid, making the dissolving process slower and keeping the glass in the body for longer times than the tissue’s recovery period, which is undesirable. Moreover, most of these glasses have relatively low mechanical properties making their usage in different implantation zones difficult. Research in the field focused on the compositional design of bioactive glasses to tailor their properties.

In this project, we are focused on investigating the effect of the thermodynamic history of the glasses on their physical properties (e.g., mechanical) and bioactivity using large scale classical and reactive atomistic simulations. The effect of alkali and alkaline earth elements is also investigated together with the glass surface reactivity.

Methods: Molecular Dynamics Simulation, Reactive Molecular Dynamics

Results:

• First results are published in the paper untitled Atomistic insights into the structure and elasticity of densified 45S5 bioactive glasses, which is published in Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics. In the paper, we investigate for the first time the effect of cooling under pressure on the bioactivity, elasticity, and structure of 45S5 bioactive glass. We propose that the properties (i.e., mechanical) of bioacive glasses can be tailored by processing working on the pressure history of the glass.