Bioactive Glasses

With the ageing of the population and the prolongation of active life, there is an increasing demand for materials that can potentially replace, repair or even regenerate injured or diseased tissues. Ceramics have found a strong position among materials used in orthopaedic implants and dental restoration. Ceramics exhibit excellent biocompatibility and high wear resistance which make them increasingly promising for orthopaedic and dental implants, such as artificial hip, knee or shoulder prostheses, dental crowns, fillers etc. However, some of their specific properties still limit their wider use in clinical applications, in particular mechanical reliability and brittleness. The growing technological importance of biomaterials has not been supported by a corresponding growth in fundamental understanding of the nature of their bioactivity, and trial-and-error approaches still represent the most common way to systematically optimize new applications of biomaterials. The availability of increasingly more powerful computational methods and resources now makes computer simulations an attractive alternative to experimental techniques, to obtain an atomistic view into the bioactive behavior of such materials and to provide new insights into the structure-property relationships of materials and this is the final aim of our work.