[Quality assurance of powders for bioceramic applications with image analysis]

Bone substitute materials are very demanding with respect to their quality, in particular, a high toughness and durability are required. In case of producing the composites by sintering of mechanically generated powder mixtures, a high efficiency of mixture is demanded, too. The characterisation of such particle systems is difficult. An effective method is the image analysis supported by statistical evaluation of both the size and the shape distributions of particles and agglomerates. As it is proved by first results, powder mixtures of hydroxyapatite can be described by the geometry of voids in the agglomerate structure using the shape factor weighted by area of the respective image object. As a measure of the efficiency of mixture, the degree of reproducibility was introduced.