In vitro tribocorrosion evaluation of carbide-derived carbon (CDC) for hip implants

ABSTRACT

Carbide-derived carbon (CDC) was previously proposed as a surface modification method for hip implant applications since it showed excellent tribocorrosion performance under open-circuit potential (OCP) conditions. Nonetheless, a systematic evaluation of the CDC’s tribocorrosion properties was still missing. Therefore, our objective is to test CDC’s tribocorrosion performance under various electrochemical conditions and to identify the synergism between wear and corrosion. Based on the findings, the variations in OCP for CDC (0.626 mV) are smaller than Ti6Al4V (1.91 mV), and CDC showed lower induced current than T6Al4V for all potentials, suggesting CDC is more stable than Ti6Al4V under tribocorrosive conditions. Eventually, the weight loss of Ti6Al4V (50.662 ± 5.19 μg) was found to be significantly higher than that of CDC (4.965 ± 5.19 μg), which agrees with the electrochemical results. In summary, CDC showed better tribocorrosion performance than Ti6Al4V and was determined as an Antagonism regime.

KEYWORDS:

• Tribocorrosion
• carbide-derived carbon (CDC)
• surface modification
• hip implants

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the Blazer Foundation (Rockford, IL, USA) NIH-R56AR070181 for the financial support and also to the Nanotechnology Core Facility (NCF), the Electron Microscope Core (EMC) and the Scientific Instrument Shop at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) for the assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health [grant number R56AR070181].