Guang Zeng - ALUMNUS
Current LinkedIn profile including contact details.
Titanium (Ti) and its alloys are widely used as load-bearing implants, however, slow but continuing release of toxic metal irons and wear debris may incur undesirable side effects.
Tantalum (Ta), an emerging metallic biomaterial, exhibits high corrosion and wear resistance in vivo, but the extremely high melting temperature of Ta (3017 ºC) is a critical technical challenge for manufacturing fully dense structures through conventional processing approaches. As such, new and feasible manufacturing techniques for Ta-based implant materials are highly desired. Cold spray, a new additive manufacturing technology, provides a promising solution to depositing metallic coatings on Ti implants with a variety of benefits, including low-temperature and solid-state process with no phase transitions in Ti/Ta mixture. These unique microstructures of cold sprayed coatings with discrete Ta particles enable large contacting surface area for cell attachment, which is quite distinct compared with bulk Ti-Ta alloys. In this study, uniform and dense Ti-Ta composite coatings (pure Ta and Ti-30 wt. %Ta) were developed on Ti-based substrates (Ti-6Al-4V) using cold spray. The unique microstructures of cold sprayed coatings were led to better cellular biocompatibility than bare Ti-6Al-4V substrate.
Figure 1. A commercial impact system by Impact Innovations
Figure 2. Microstructure of Cold Sprayed Ti-30%Ta coating
This project was conducted in conjunction with CSIRO.
Metal Fabrication
Cold spray, melt pool, friction stir welding, multifunctional coatings for biomedical Mg alloys, visual monitoring of metal powder
