Compared to Bioglass 45S5, silicate 13-93 bioactive glass is composed of a higher composition of SiO and includes KO and MgO. It is commercially available from Mo-Sci Corp. or can be directly prepared by melting a mixture of NaCO, KCO, MgCO, CaCO, SiO and NaHPO · 2HO in a platinum crucible at 1300 °C and quenching between stainless steel plates.
The 13-93 glass has received approval for in vivo use in the USA and Europe. It has more facile viscous flow behavior and a lower tendency to crystallize upon being pulled into fibers. 13-93 bioactive glass powder could be dispersed into a binder to create ink for robocasting or direct ink 3D printing technique. The mechanical properties of the resulting porous scaffolds have been studied in various works of literature.
The printed 13-93 bioactive glass scaffold in the study by Liu et al. was dried in ambient air, fired to 600 °C under the O atmosphere to remove the processing additives, and sintered in air for 1 hour at 700 °C. In the pristine sample, the flexural strength (11 ± 3 MPa) and flexural modulus (13 ± 2 MPa) are comparable to the minimum value of those of trabecular bones while the compressive strength (86 ± 9 MPa) and compressive modulus (13 ± 2 GPa) are close to the cortical bone values. However, the fracture toughness of the as-fabricated scaffold was 0.48 ± 0.04 MPa·m, indicating that it is more brittle than human cortical bone whose fracture toughness is 2–12 MPa·m. After immersing the sample in a simulated body fluid (SBF) or subcutaneous implantation in the dorsum of rats, the compressive strength and compressive modulus decrease sharply during the initial two weeks but more gradually after two weeks. The decrease in the mechanical properties was attributed to the partial conversion of the glass filaments in the scaffolds into a layer mainly composed of a porous hydroxyapatite-like material.
Another work by Kolan and co-workers used selective laser sintering instead of conventional heat treatment. After the optimization of the laser power, scan speed, and heating rate, the compressive strength of the sintered scaffolds varied from 41 MPa for a scaffold with ~50% porosity to 157 MPa for dense scaffolds. The in vitro study using SBF resulted in a decrease in the compressive strength but the final value was similar to that of human trabecular bone.
13-93 porous glass scaffolds were synthesized using a polyurethane foam replication method in the report by Fu et al. The stress-strain relationship was examined in obtained from the compressive test using eight samples with 85 ± 2% porosity. The resultant curve demonstrated a progressive breaking down of the scaffold structure and the average compressive strength of 11 ± 1 MPa, which was in the range of human trabecular bone and higher than competitive bioactive materials for bone repairing such as hydroxyapatite scaffolds with the same extent of pores and polymer-ceramic composites prepared by the thermally induced phase separation (TIPS) method.