| Synthetic analogues of bone are being actively pursued as materials for biomedical applications in the field of bone replacement, augmentation and repair. Numerous stringent criteria have to be met for a biomaterial to be considered as an acceptable bone implant, including the ability to integrate into bone and not cause any deleterious side effects. Different approaches to a bone implant materials are introduced.; A materials chemistry approach to synthesizing a new type of bone analogue material is described. The strategy involves the spontaneous growth, under aqueous physiological pH conditions, of an oriented hydroxyapatite film with micron dimension porosity, on the surface of a layer of TiO{dollar}sb2{dollar} that has been sputter deposited on Ti metal. This procedure creates desirable co-crystallized phases of hydroxyapatite (OHAp) and octacalcium phosphate (OCP) with preferred orientation respectively along the (001) and (101) directions. In an attempt to mimic the hierarchical organic-inorganic composite construction of bone, a calcium dodecylphosphate ester mesolamellar phase has been integrated into these oriented porous films to create a CaDDP-OHAp-OCP-TiO{dollar}sb2{dollar}-Ti multilayer architecture. The nucleation and growth processes, together with the characterization of these films, are investigated using a multi-analytical approach based upon PXRD, SEM, TEM, SAED, XPS, FT-IR microscopy and profilometry. The relationship of the synthetic calcium phosphate composite materials to bone as well as other bone analogue materials is discussed. |
