Enhancing glass ionomer cement features by using the HA/YSZ nanocomposite: A feed forward neural network modelling

Despite brilliant properties of glass ionomer cement (GIC), its weak mechanical property poses an obstacle for its use in medical applications. The present research aims to formulate hydroxyapatite/yttria-stabilized zirconia (HA/YSZ) in the composition of GIC to enhance mechanical properties and to improve fluoride release of GIC. HA/YSZ was synthesized via a sol–gel method and characterized by applying X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), X-ray photo-emission spectroscopy (XPS) and simultaneous thermal analysis (STA) along with transmission electron microscopy (TEM) methods. The synthesized nanocomposite was mixed with GIC at a fixed composition of 5 wt%. The effect of different weight percentages of YSZ:HA on GIC was investigated by measuring the compressive strength, diametral tensile strength, microhardness and fluoride release. The results showed that, after 1 and 7 days of setting, the 20 wt% nanohydroxyapatite/80 wt% stabilized zirconia cement exhibited higher compressive strength (1857–245 MPa), higher diametral tensile strength (11–14 MPa) and greater microhardness (104–106 MPa) as compared with the pure GIC (65–88 MPa in compressive strength, 5–9.5 MPa in diametral tensile strength and 70–89 MPa in microhardness). The reinforced cement, also, exhibited higher fluoride release compared with pure GIC. tificial neural network (ANN) was trained for modeling the system. Results obtained by ANN have proved to be completely in accordance with expectations.