The pivotal role of the polyethylene glycol amount as compatibilizing on the morphological features of silica-based blends

Silica-based hybrid blends at different molecular or nanometer scale have gained a lot of interests from the technological point of view. In particular, several inorganic-organic hybrids find application in the biomedical field. In this context, inorganic SiO2 and hybrids made up of SiO2 and polyethylene glycol (PEG) have been synthesised via the sol-gel route and characterised from the morphological (throught the Atomic Force Microscopy - AFM) and spectroscopic point of view to shed light on their features as possible hybrid biomaterials. AFM investigation allowed for an effective quantitative evaluation of surface roughness of bioactive sol-gel-based materials. The results revealed an increase in material porosity as a function of the PEG amount in the systems, thus highlighting the pivotal role of the PEG amount as compatibilizing on the morphological features of silica-based blends. The co-presence of both the inorganic and organic phases was confirmed by the Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR). Moreover, the influence of PEG was also investigated by analysing the deconvoluted FT-IR spectra in the range of 1600-750 cm-1.