Kinetic neutron diffraction and SANS studies of phase formation in bioactive machinable glass ceramics

Bioactive fluormica-fluorapatite glass-ceramic materials offer a very encouraging solution to the problem of efficient restoration and reconstruction of hard tissues. To produce material with the desired crystalline phases, a five-stage heat treatment must be performed. This thermal processing has a large impact on the microstructure and ultimately the final mechanical properties of the materials. We have examined the thermal processing of one of our most promising machinable biomaterials, using time-resolved small angle neutron scattering and neutron diffraction to study the nucleation and growth of crystallites. The processing route had already been optimized by studying the properties of quenched samples using x-ray diffraction, mechanical measurements and differential thermal analysis. However these results show that the heat treatment can be further optimized in terms of crystal nucleation, and we show that these techniques are the only methods by which a truly optimized thermal processing route may be obtained.