Alumina coatings for wear resistant biomedical devices: Manufacturing and modelling

The purpose of this work is to study alternatives for articulating surfaces of orthopaedic prostheses which may be able to match the properties of the currently available metal devices and those of the full ceramic components. The research is an attempt to explore the possibility to introduce Alumina as thin coatings on metal substrates such as titanium alloy. The coatings are obtained by means of the Pulsed Laser Deposition (PLD), a versatile technique that offers great advantages with respect to other physical vapour deposition processes, namely the capability of depositing almost any kind of material, ranging from metals to insulating oxides and multicomponent systems, on almost any kind of substrate. The mechanical characterization of the coatings has been carried out through a set of nano-indentation tests at different maximum loads. Following an hybrid experimentalnumerical approach, finite element analyses of the indentation tests allowed the identification of the elastic and inelastic constitutive parameters of the PLD Alumina coatings.