Abstract:
In the sintering of hydroxyapatite, the resulting microstructure and properties were influenced not only from the characteristics and impurities of the raw materials but also found to be dependent on the thermal history during the fabrication process. A commercially available hydroxyapatite powder was pressed at 120 MPa and sintered in air at temperature ranging from 1050°c to 1300°c with a dwell time of 1, 2 and 4 hours and the ambient relative humidity was 65-75%. The sintering condition was observed to be optimal at 1250°c for 2 hours where the material consisted of pure hydroxyapatite phase. The specimen exhibited greater than 97% of theoretical density while the apparent porosity was less than 0.9% with a Vickers hardness value of 7.05 GPa. Decomposition of Hydroxyapatite did not occur at this sintering condition, therefore sintering in saturated moisture atmosphere used for decreasing dehydroxylation was not necessary. Nevertheless, after sintering at this temperature for 12 hours, the formation of tricalciumphosphate was observed. The change in grain size was found to be dependent on the sintering temperature and dwell time. The Arrhenius relationship between average grain size and temperatue could be calculated given a value of activation energy for each material. The sintering kinetics had been used to correlate between the grain size and sintering time. As a result, an appropriate sintering schedule for various applications can be designed.