Marisa Masumi Beppu, Marco Antonio Torres, Cassiano Gomes Aimoli, Gilberto Alessandre Soares Goulart, and Cesar Costapinto Santana
Faculdade de Engenharia Quámica, Unicamp CP6066 CEP13083-970, Campinas, SP, Brazil
Pseudo-simulated body fluids (SBFs) were used in in vitro experiments to promote chitosan porous membrane calcification. Common SBFs, which had concentrations of phosphate or calcium ions doubled, were so named because they do not replicate, by rigor, a genuine body fluid ion concentration. The objective of using such calcification fluids was to study the influence of phosphate and calcium excess in solution on mineralization deposit characteristics. SEM-EDS analyses showed that morphology and composition of deposits varies depending on which ion (phosphate or calcium) is in excess; x-ray diffractograms show that deposits are poorly crystalline (like biological apatites) but still show better crystallinity in deposits generated from P-rich SBF. This result, added to previous ones [such as those reported by Beppu and Santana in Mater. Res. 5, 47 (2002)] where a difference in the interconnectivity of the inorganic and organic (matrix) phases was stressed, suggests different deposition processes for each situation.