Characteristics of Ag-incorporated bioactive glasses prepared by a modified sol-gel method with a shortened synthesis time and without the use of catalysts.

This work presents the preparation of bioactive glasses 70SiO-(26 - )CaO-4PO-AgO (with = 0, 1, 3, 10 mol%) by a modified sol-gel method with reduced synthesis time based on hydrothermal reaction in a medium without acid or base catalysts. The synthetic materials were characterized by several physical-chemical techniques such as TG-DSC, XRD, SEM, TEM, and N adsorption/desorption measurement. The analysis data confirmed that the glass sample not containing Ag has a completely amorphous structure, while glass samples containing Ag exhibited a pure phase of metallic nano-silver in the glass amorphous phase.