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Description
Natural dolomite sedimentary rocks, which can be found in abundance in Perlis is a carbonate mineral rich with calcium and magnesium elements. These both elements were important and typically found in bioceramic materials especially for hard tissue implant material. Even though raw Perlis dolomite powder has other various elemental compositions, it lacks important component such as silica and phosphate, which commonly used as glass net-work former, therefore limits its potential application as bioceramic materials. This study examines the effects of different percentages of silica powder addition on sintered Perlis dolomite and the changes in its structure, phase transformation and compressive strength were analyzed. Perlis dolomite with different ratios of silica (25-45 wt. %) were ball milled, compacted into pallets and sintered at 1250°C for 4 hours. The results showed at lower silica content (≤30 wt. %), MgO phase become the dominant phase. But increasing the silica content leads to the formation of akermanite, monticellite, and merwinite phase before merwinite phase disappearing at 45 wt. %. Higher silica content in dolomite enhances phase stability by increasing akermanite phase, reduces shrinkage and increases densification of the sintered samples which contributes to the improvement in compressive strength.
