PVD Coating for Hip Implants

Background

Hip implants are designed to replace damaged or worn-out hip joints, providing patients with improved mobility and quality of life. These implants typically consist of a metallic femoral head that articulates with a metal, ceramic or polyethylene acetabular cup. Over time, however, the mechanical stress and corrosive environment within the hip joint can lead to tribocorrosion (wear assisted corrosion) of the hip implant, resulting in material loss, cobalt release, and potentially negative health outcomes.

Challenges

Preventing tribocorrosion in hip implants is a significant challenge, as it requires balancing the requirements of biocompatibility, mechanical strength, wear and corrosion resistance. Researchers have been studying the application of various protective layers to reduce tribocorrosion on hip implants. An effective coating must be uniform, corrosion resistant, strongly bonded to its substrate and most importantly, biocompatible.

Solutions

Here at Aurora, we offer a solution with our TiSiN (brand name: ORION-R) nanocomposite coating for the surface of hip implants to protect them fromtribocorrosion. This type of coating has high hardness, high elastic modulus, low friction coefficient and high wear and corrosion resistances. TiSiN coating significantly reduced the material loss from fretting wear and protected the CoCrMo alloy from cobalt releasing. The detailed study on TiSiN nanocomposite coating has been published and available at the "Journal of Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials".