Medical applications of zirconium oxide hybrid materials

The zirconium oxide hybrid materials are making new inroads into the medical applications. The zirconium oxide hybrid materials are used in tissue-engineering scaffolds, microscale valves, microfluidic devices, drug-screening devices, drug delivery devices, bone prostheses and other medical devices. One of the group of researches has created poly(epsiloncaprolactone)/ zirconium oxide organic-inorganic hybrid materials by a sol-gel approach. They developed composite materials in which poly(epsilon-caprolactone)/zirconium oxide organic-inorganic hybrid material served as a filler and poly(epsilon-caprolactone) served as a matrix. Another group used a sol-gel approach to prepare HA/30 weight percent yttria-stabilized zirconia nanopowder. They doped zirconia with 0.8 mole percent yttria by reacting zirconium alkoxides with yttrium acetate. Another group of researchers have demonstrated the use of zirconium of oxide-based sol-gels for fabricating microcavities, which may be used as high-Q whispering mode galleries.