Developing Highly Porous Borate Glass Microspheres via a Single-Stage Flame Spheroidisation Process Nur Aisyah Nuzulia (a,b), Md Towhidul Islam (c,d), Angga Saputra (b), Toto Sudiro (e), Gerald Ensang Timuda (e), Terry Mart (a*), Yessie Widya Sari (b), and Ifty Ahmed (c)
a) Department of Physics, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Universitas Indonesia
* terry.mart[at]sci.ui.ac.id
b) Department of Physics, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, IPB University
c) Advanced Materials Research Group, Faculty of Engineering, University of Nottingham
d) Department of Applied Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Noakhali Science and Technology University, Noakhali-3814, Bangladesh
e)Research Center for Physics, Indonesian Institute of Sciences, Indonesia
Abstract
Porous bioactive glass microspheres have been developed for biomedical application due to their excellent bioactivity, osteoinductivity and osteoconductivity properties. The spherical particles offer a larger surface area over irregular shaped particles. In addition, porous spherical particles possess greater loading efficiency for incorporating drugs and biological molecules and having good flow properties for facilitating minimally invasive injection. This paper presents the manufacture of B53P4 glass microspheres (solid and porous) by using a flame spheroidisation process and investigates the effect of various acetylene and oxygen gas ratios on the morphological changes of B53P4 glass microspheres. The irregular shaped B53P4 glass particles with starting particle size ranges of 63 up to 125 micrometres were used as feed and delivered to a hot flame to prepare microspheres. In addition, calcium carbonate was utilised as a porogen for the manufacture of B53P4 porous glass microspheres via single-stage flame spheroidisation process. Solid and porous glass microspheres were successfully produced in various acetylene and oxygen gas ratios of 3 to 3, 4 to 7, 5 to 7 and 6 to 7 with the mean particle size range of 73 up to 105 micrometres. Moreover, the average pore sizes of 6 micrometres and 9 micrometres were obtained by using 5 to 7 and 6 to 7 gas ratios, respectively. Therefore, single-stage flame spheroidisation process is a promising method for production of porous borate glass microspheres.
Keywords: acetylene, oxygen, scanning electron microscope
