BEP - Bone Tissue Engineering

Compressive moduli and distributions of bioactive glass based grafts with various granule sizes

Jordy van Leeuwen

Bioactive glass (BAG) has been widely investigated as a material for synthetic bone grafts in many researches of the biomaterials field of science. This experiment intends to discover whether there is an effect of morselized bioactive glass granules on the compressive moduli, as well as determine the distribution of these morselized granules. The porosity of the samples is determined by scanning these samples using μCT and after the compressive tests the severity of plastic deformation is measured by scanning once more. By using confined compression, the strain is determined of the samples. After the compressive modulus is determined, the breaking point is then measured by increasing the pressure until plastic deformation is observed. Before impaction, the samples showed a porosity that was relatively different from one another. After impaction, analysis of porosity hinted to a similar porosity between groups. Distribution of particles showed unexpected results, having no clear spikes in particle size. The compressive moduli showed overlap between groups, with group 3 (BAG-L/S ratio 1:1) and group 5 (pure BAG-S) having the highest and lowest means and therefore being the most resilient and most brittle groups, respectively (3.769 ± 5.7203 · 10-2 GPa and 2.524 ± 2.331 · 10-2 GPa). Statistical analysis of the compressive modulus indicated that there were no statistical differences between the distributions of the groups. It appears that the pulverized granules have no significant impact on the load bearing capabilities of a graft sample; however, no conclusion can be drawn in correlation to the porosity or distribution of the granules due to insufficient scanning data.