Direct Process to Prepare Crystallized Freestanding Membranes of Hydroxyapatite Using Sacrificial Layer of Barium-Compounds

Freestanding membrane (FSM) of hydroxyapatite (HA) is a thin sheet of pure HA without any supporting substrates. Our original preparation process of FSM of HA had three steps: The first was the deposition of HA layer on sacrificial layer of solvent-soluble materials, the second was separation of FSM of HA by means of dissolution of sacrificial layer, and the third was post-annealing to crystallize FSM of HA. To date, the post-annealing process was a serious bottleneck of productivity owing to its too long time. In this short report, we proposed a novel sacrificial layer, heatproof and water-soluble Ba-compound, which makes the direct deposition of crystallized HA possible due to its heatproof property because the problem on the original process was that the previous sacrificial layers have no heatproof property and HA layer should be deposited as amorphous. We can deposit the Ba-compound sacrificial layer only in 1 hour followed with the direct deposition of crystallized HA layer, substituting the 20 hours of post-annealing. The FSM of HA was separated successfully from the substrate by means of dissolution of Ba-compound with water. Our novel process can shrink the process time by 19 hours.