Developments in metallic biomaterials and surface coatings for various biomedical applications

Abstract

Metallic materials serve a great deal in biomedical applications due to specific desired properties mimicking to human anatomy in terms of hard tissues. Of these materials titanium-based alloys are the most preferred materials in orthopaedics and dentistry due to resemblance in mechanical behaviour of these materials to human bones and dentistry. But, these materials lack in certain characteristic properties, which makes them unable to be bioactive in nature. For this, metallic biomaterials are treated to inculcate various functional properties in them. Most common of these techniques is by surface coating using bioactive materials like hydroxyapatite (HAp). Alone HAp as well as HAp-based composite coatings find significant application in improving biomedical properties of metallic materials. This paper provides an in-depth review of various developments in applications of various conventional as well as newer metallic biomaterials and discusses techniques to improve properties of these biomaterials for number of biomedical applications.