Eugeni Cañas

In-vitro study of bioactive glass coatings deposited by plasma spraying

Betreuer in Erlangen: Dr. Rainer Detsch, Prof. Aldo R. Boccaccini

Betreuer in Instituto de Tecnología Cerámica (ITC),  Castellón, Spain: Prof. Enrique Sánchez, Dr. María José Orts

Bioactive glasses can be used as coatings for prosthetic metallic implants because of their high bioactivity and osteoconductivity. There are several techniques to deposit these coatings, with plasma spraying being one of the most employed methods, as recognized by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA). During the first period of the Ph.D. thesis, Eugeni deposited bioactive coatings by atmospheric plasma spraying (APS) employing a home-made 45S5 bioactive glass which was developed by the melting and quenching method [1,2]. In addition, the resulting glass was dry milled and sieved in order to obtain different powder size fractions to assess the effect of the particle size on the flowability and thermal behavior of these feedstocks with the aim of contributing to optimize the feeding of bioactive glass powders in the APS process. Since promising results were obtained from the immersion of the developed coatings in Simulated Body Fluid [3], the main purpose of the present work is to complete the in-vitro characterization performing a cellular study. MC3T3-E1 bone cells will be cultured, seeded onto the coatings and incubated for 48 hours. Then, cell viability will be assessed as well as cell adhesion, distribution, and morphology. This work is being carried out in the framework of the 10^th call of The European Virtual Institute on Knowledge-based Multifunctional Materials AISBL (KMM-VIN)research fellowships.

[1] V. López, M. Vicent, E. Bannier, E. Cañas, A.R. Boccaccini, L. Cordero, E. Sánchez, 45S5 bioactive glass coatings by atmospheric plasma spraying obtained from feedstocks prepared by different routes, J. Mater. Sci. 49 (2014) 7933–7942.

[2] E. Cañas, M. Vicent, E. Bannier, P. Carpio, M.J. Orts, E. Sánchez, Effect of particle size on processing of bioactive glass powder for atmospheric plasma spraying, J. Eur. Ceram. Soc. 36 (2016) 837–845

[3] E. Cañas, M. J. Orts, A. R. Boccaccini, E. Sánchez, Solution Precursor Plasma Spraying (SPPS): A novel and simple process to obtain bioactive glass coatings, Materials Letters 223 (2018) 198-202