A facile synthesis of novel mesoporous bioactive glass nanoparticles with various morphologies and tunable mesostructure by sacrificial liquid template method

• Ethyl acetate micro-emulsion droplets were used as a sacrificial liquid template which would be corroded by ammonia in sol–gel process to synthetized mesoporous bioactive glasses.
• Mesoporous bioactive glass nanospheres with a wide tunable radiate mesoporous and size were successfully synthetized.
• Mesoporous bioactive glass pineal nanoparticle (PBG) with a tunable lamellar mesoporous and size were successfully synthetized.
• Severe problems like uncontrollable mesoporous and size, irregular shape and low specific surface area of the conventional BGs particles have been solved.

In this paper, two types of mesoporous bioactive glasses (MBGs) including spherical MBGs (SBG) with radial mesostructure and pineal MBGs (PBG) with lamellar mesostructure have been successfully synthesized through a novel sacrificial liquid template method in sol–gel process. The morphologies and structures of the samples were characterized and the results demonstrated that ethyl acetate was added in the hexadecy ltrimethyl ammonium bromide aqueous solution to form micro-emulsion droplets as liquid template; the aqueous ammonia was added as template corrodent and hydrolysis catalyst. The morphology of MBGs could be controlled by the reaction conditions. Meanwhile, the size and the mesostructure of MBGs could be tuned by the aqueous ammonia concentration. The novel MBGs may be a good candidate as therapeutic molecules carriers for bone and dental tissue regeneration.