Typical silicate bioactive glasses are known to crystallize readily during the processing of porous scaffolds. While such crystallization does not fully suppress the bioactivity, the presence of significantly large amounts of crystals leads to a decrease in the rate of reaction of the glass and an uncontrolled release of ions. Furthermore, due to the non-congruent dissolution of silicate glasses, these materials have been shown to remain within the surgical site even 14 years post-operation. Therefore, bioactive materials that can dissolve more effectively and have higher conversion rates are required. Within this work, boron was introduced, in the FDA approved S53P4 glass, at the expense of SiO₂. The crystallization and sintering-ability of the newly developed glasses were investigated by differential thermal analysis. All the glasses were found to crystallize primarily from the surface, and the crystal phase precipitation was dependent on the quantity of B₂O₃ incorporated. The rate of crystallization was found to be lower for the glasses when 25, 50 and 75% of SiO₂ was replaced with B₂O₃. These glasses were further sintered into porous scaffolds using simple heat sintering. The impact of glass particle size and heat treatment temperature on the scaffold porosity and average pore size was investigated. Scaffolds with porosity ranging from 10 to 60% and compressive strength ranging from 1 to 35 MPa were produced. The scaffolds remained amorphous during processing and their ability to rapidly precipitate hydroxycarbonate apatite was maintained. This is of particular interest in the field of tissue engineering as scaffold degradation and reaction is generally faster and offers higher controllability as opposed to the current partially/fully crystallized scaffolds obtained from the FDA approved bioactive glasses.

The direct doping method was applied to fabricate upconverter fluorophosphate glasses in the system (90NaPO ₃ -(10- x )Na ₂ O- x NaF) (mol%) by adding NaYF ₄ :Er ³⁺ ,Yb ³⁺ nanocrystals.

The effect of the incorporation of Er₂O₃-doped particles on the structural and luminescence properties of phosphate glasses was investigated. A series of different Er₂O₃-doped TiO₂, ZnO, and ZrO₂ microparticles was synthesized using soft chemistry and then added into various phosphate glasses after the melting at a lower temperature than the melting temperature. The compositional, morphological, and structural analyses of the particles-containing glasses were performed using elemental mapping by field emission-scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM) with energy dispersive x-ray spectrometry (EDS) and x-ray diffraction (XRD). Additionally, the luminescence spectra and the lifetime values were measured to study the influence of the particles incorporation on the spectroscopic properties of the glasses. From the spectroscopic properties of the glasses with the composition 50P₂O₅-40SrO-10Na₂O, a large amount of the Er₂O₃-doped particles is thought to dissolve during the glass melting. Conversely, the particles were found to survive in glasses with a composition 90NaPO₃-(10 − x)Na₂O-xNaF (with x = 0 and 10 mol %) due to their lower processing temperature, thus clearly showing that the direct doping method is a promising technique for the development of new active glasses.