Bioactive glasses have been used as coatings for biomedical implants because they can be formulated to promote osseointegration, antibacterial behavior, bone formation, and tissue healing through the incorporation and subsequent release of certain ions. However, shear loading on coated implants has been reported to cause the delamination and loosening of such coatings. This work uses a recently developed fracture mechanics testing methodology to quantify the critical strain energy release rate under nearly pure mode II conditions, GIIC, of a series of borate-based glass coating/Ti6Al4V alloy substrate systems. Incorporating increasing amounts of SrCO3in the glass composition was found to increase the GIICalmost twofold, from 25.3 to 46.9J/m2. The magnitude and distribution of residual stresses in the coating were quantified, and it was found that the residual stresses in all cases distributed uniformly over the cross section of the coating. The crack was driven towards, but not into, the glass/Ti6Al4V substrate interface due to the shear loading. This implied that the interface had a higher fracture toughness than the coating itself.
It has been reported that the adhesion of bioactive glass coatings to Ti6Al4V reduces after degradation, however, this effect has not been quantified. This paper uses bilayer double cantilever (DCB) specimens to determine GIC and GIIC, the critical mode I and mode II strain energy release rates, respectively, of bioactive coating/Ti6Al4V substrate systems degraded to different extents. Three borate-based bioactive glass coatings with increasing amounts of incorporated SrO (0, 15 and 25mol%) were enamelled onto Ti6Al4V substrates and then immersed in de-ionized water for 2, 6 and 24h. The weight loss of each glass composition was measured and it was found that the dissolution rate significantly decreased with increasing SrO content. The extent of dissolution was consistent with the hypothesis that the compressive residual stress tends to reduce the dissolution rate of bioactive glasses. After drying, the bilayer DCB specimens were created and subjected to nearly mode I and mode II fracture tests. The toughest coating/substrate system (one composed of the glass containing 25mol% SrO) lost 80% and 85% of its GIC and GIIC, respectively, in less than 24h of degradation. The drop in GIC and GIIC occurred even more rapidly for other coating/substrate systems. Therefore, degradation of borate bioactive glass coatings is inversely related to their fracture toughness when coated onto Ti6A4V substrates. Finally, roughening the substrate was found to be inconsequential in increasing the toughness of the system as the fracture toughness was limited by the cohesive toughness of the glass itself.
In an attempt to combat the possibility of bacterial infection and insufficient bone growth around metallic, surgical implants, bioactive glasses may be employed as coatings. In this work, silica-based and borate-based glass series were synthesized for this purpose and subsequently characterized in terms of antibacterial behavior, solubility and cytotoxicity. Borate-based glasses were found to exhibit significantly superior antibacterial properties and increased solubility compared to their silica-based counterparts, with BRT0 and BRT3 (borate-based glasses with 0 and 15 mol% of titanium dioxide incorporated, respectively) outperforming the remainder of the glasses, both borate and silicate based, in these respects. Atomic Absorption Spectroscopy confirmed the release of zinc ions (Zn(2+)), which has been linked to the antibacterial abilities of glasses SRT0, BRT0 and BRT3, with inhibition effectively achieved at concentrations lower than 0.7 ppm. In vitro cytotoxicity studies using MC3T3-E1 osteoblasts confirmed that cell proliferation was affected by all glasses in this study, with decreased proliferation attributed to a faster release of sodium ions over calcium ions in both glass series, factor known to slow cell proliferation in vitro.