Weibull modulus and fracture strength of highly porous hydroxyapatite

Porous hydroxyapatite (HA) is used in a variety of applications including biomedical materials such as engineered bone materials and microbe filters. Despite the utility of the Weibull modulus, m, as a gauge of the mechanical reliability of brittle solids, there have been very few studies of m for porous HA. A recent study of porous HA that included the current authors (Fan, X., Case, E.D., Ren, F., Shu, Y., Baumann, M.J., 2012a. Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials. 8, 21–36) showed increases in m for porosity, P, approaching PG, the porosity of the green (unfired) specimen. In this paper, 18 groups of highly porous HA specimens (12 groups fabricated in this study and 6 groups from Fan et al., 2012a) were analyzed with P values from 0.59 to 0.62, where PG=0.62. The partially sintered HA specimens were fractured in biaxial flexure using a ring-on-ring test fixture. The fracture strength decreased monotonically with decreasing sintering temperature, Tsinter, from 4.8 MPa for specimens sintered at 1025 °C–0.66 MPa for specimens sintered at 350 °C. However, the Weibull modulus remained surprisingly high, ranging from 6.6 to 15.5. In comparison, for HA specimens with intermediate values of P, from about 0.1–0.55, the Weibull modulus tended to be lower (ranging from about 4 to 11) than the highly porous specimens included in this study.

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► 432 HA with porosities, P, from 0.59 to 0.62 were sintered and biaxially fractured.
► Weibull moduli, m, (6.6–15.5) were surprisingly high for highly porous specimens.
► In Region II 4► Trend of high m values at high P may hold for other brittle materials.
► Fracture strength decreased monotonically with decreasing sintering temperature.