Crystallographic characterization of fluorapatite glass-ceramics synthesized from industrial waste

Abstract

A series of phase transformations of a novel fluoroaluminosilicate glass forming a range of fluorapatite glass-ceramics on sintering are reported. The sintering process induces formation of fluorapatite, mullite, and anorthite phases within the amorphous silicate matrices of the glass-ceramics. The fluoroaluminosilicate glass, SiO2–Al2O3–P2O5–CaO–CaF2, is prepared from waste materials, such as rice husk ash, pacific oyster shells, and disposable aluminium cans. The thermally induced crystallographic and microstructure evolution of the fluoroaluminosilicate glass towards the fluorapatite glass-ceramics, with applications in dental and bone restoration, are investigated by powder X-ray diffraction and small-angle neutron-scattering techniques.

Performance and characteristics of the BILBY time-of-flight small-angle neutron scattering instrument

“…inclusion in the Australian Centre for Neutron Scattering user programme in 2016, BILBY has contributed to a wide variety of scientific projects in fields such as chemistry, biology and physics, with diverse samples including metals, cokes (Sakurovs et al, 2018), cements (Loy et al, 2017(Loy et al, , 2018, polymers (Baek et al, 2017;Dae Jang et al, 2018), peptides, mesoporous materials (Jiang et al, 2018) and lipids/surfactants (Iqbal et al, 2017;Kelleppan et al, 2018;Lin et al, 2016;Marlow et al, 2018;McCoy et al, 2018;Moore et al, 2018). BILBY's complementarity to the other SANS instruments at ANSTO has been demonstrated.…”

Possibilities of the X-ray diffraction data processing method for detecting reflections with intensity below the background noise component

“…The method of X-ray phase analysis is widely used to study many types of materials (steels (Garin and Mannheim, 2012), alloys (Sariel et al, 2008), glass ceramics (Wilkins et al, 2020;Loy et al, 2017), ceramics (Murugesan et al, 2023), etc.) containing crystalline phases.…”

“…The number of measured impulses is often in the range of hundreds of thousands for intense peaks and cannot be below tens of thousands for secondary peaks (Guinebretière, 2007). However, in practice, the signal-to-noise ratio may not have large values, for example, 80-130 (Garin and Mannheim, 2012), ∼70 (Sariel et al, 2008), 30-60 (Wilkins et al, 2020), and ∼45 (Loy et al, 2017).…”

“…Comments to the symbol list: I b , I d q , 2u d q are observed diffraction data; I c b , 2u c b , I c q , 2u c q are calculated diffraction data: However, situations are possible when researchers are forced to be satisfied with a low signal-to-noise ratio (values 3-4 (Loy et al, 2017)). This, for example, occurs if the time of studying the sample is limited when determining the phase composition and the content of the detected phases of steel directly in the process of its heat treatment (Wiessner et al, 2021).…”

Microstructure characterisation through ultra-small-angle neutron scattering

“…In the following we will focus on the capabilities of the Kookaburra USANS instrument. For recent results on a variety of scientific topics studied with Kookaburra see, for example, references [5][6][7][8][9][10][11].…”