A NOVEL COMBINATORIAL DESIGN STRATEGY FOR BIOMEDICAL TI-BASED ALLOYS

Abstract

 Titanium alloys with benign elements including Nb, Mo, Ta, and Zr are promising biomedical materials owing to their corrosion resistance, biocompatibility, high strength, toughness, and wear resistance. However, stress shielding has limited their use. When soft bone tissue (E=20-40GPa) is replaced with a stiffer implant, the implant guards the surrounding skeleton. Lessening bone loads causes resorption, which reduces bone density, mineralization, and strength. Stress shielding may cause joint loosening, implant failure, or fragment-caused infections. For this reason, our research aims to create a novel biomaterial for load transfer implants. An ab initio theoretical computation was utilised to relate elastic characteristics from homogenised multiphase elastic parameters for designing novel Ti-Mo-Nb-Zr alloys with bone matching modulus. The consistency between forecasts and extensive experimental characterization throws insight on the multi-phase feature of polycrystalline composites' structural and mechanical properties. The impact of heat treatment and cold work on alloy modulus is also discussed. The work reveals that the unique combinatorial technique may be particularly advantageous for decreasing the Young's modulus of metallic biomaterials, which prevents stress shielding and bone resorption in orthopaedic implants.