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Influence of screw holes and gamma sterilization on properties of phosphate glass fiber-reinforced composite bone plates

Polymers prepared from polylactic acid (PLA) have found a multitude of uses as medical devices. For a material that degrades, the main advantage is that an implant would not necessitate a second surgical event for removal. In this study, fibers produced from a quaternary phosphate-based glass (PBG) in the system 50P2O5-40CaO-5Na2O-5Fe2O3 were used to reinforce PLA polymer. The purpose of this study was to assess the effect of screw holes in a range of PBG-reinforced PLA composites with varying fiber layup and volume fraction. The flexural properties obtained showed that the strength and modulus values increased with increasing fiber volume fraction; from 96 MPa to 320 MPa for strength and between 4 GPa and 24 GPa for modulus. Furthermore, utilizing a larger number of thinner unidirectional (UD) fiber prepreg layers provided a significant increase in mechanical properties, which was attributed to enhanced wet out and thus better fiber dispersion during production. The effect of gamma sterilization via flexural tests showed no statistically significant difference between the sterilized and nonsterilized samples, with the exception of the modulus values for samples with screw holes. Degradation profiles revealed that samples with screw holes degraded faster than those without screw holes due to an increased surface area for the plates with screw holes in PBS up to 30 days. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) analysis revealed fiber pullout before and after degradation. Compared with various fiber impregnation samples, with 25% volume fraction, 8 thinner unidirectional prepreg stacked samples had the shortest fiber pull-out lengths in comparison to the other samples investigated.