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Corrosion Fatigue

During the early 1990’s it became obvious to us that while many of the metals and alloys, traditionally used for biomedical applications, had been evaluated for their corrosion fatigue properties, their behavior had not been examined using standardized procedures in any way resembling the in vivo environment. Many of these alloys had been evaluated using solutions and temperatures, not even remotely representative of the in vivo conditions. As a result of an extensive review of the literature, and a fundamental interest in this area, we began corrosion fatigue research on stainless steels, titanium and titanium alloys as well as Co-Cr alloys used for biomedical applications. Our purpose was to determine the effects of a single solution (Ringers) as compared to de-ionized distilled water on the fatigue performance of these alloys at 37ºC. Because of our twenty year history of failure analysis of retrieved implants, the recognition of fatigue as the primary mechanism of implant fracture, and some of the confusion in the early literature, we have also attempted to correlate the fracture mechanisms with fracture surface morphology and fundamentals of metals structure. To date, we have published a number of papers in this area on titanium alloys and stainless steels and have worked with several industrial partners during the development of new materials and processing.