Marine species, such as corals, sea shells and nacres, attract special interest in bioceramics field for bone graft, bone cements and drug delivery applications. Most of the marine structures are made up of pure calcium carbonate with a very small amount of an organic matrix. The the past, the most common way to transform these structures to hydroxyapatite was hydrothermal transformation method. This current work introduces a new approach for producing fine powders of calcium phosphates from Mediterranean mussel shells. A comparative study was carried out to investigate the differences of these powders under only hot plate heating with ultrasonic agitation while H3PO4 was added. The temperature of the hotplate was kept constant at 80 deg C and then, H3PO4 was added drop wise into the solution for 2 hours. The mixture was then placed into an oven at 100 deg C for 24 hours. They were further calcined at 800 deg C for 3 hours. XRD, FTIR and ICP-MS were used to identify the structure and composition. It was found that the final powders were predominantly monetite, with some tricalcium phosphate as a secondary phase. This relatively simple and efficient method can be easily applied to produce calcium phosphate precursor powders for a range of biomedical applications.
