Materials for Orthopedic Applications

Abstract

Orthopaedic devices come in different shapes, sizes, and forms, varying in accordance to their respective applications, sites of usage, load-bearing and non-load-bearing capacities, patient anatomy and physiology, and design requirements of medical device companies and orthopaedic surgeons. Most of these devices have geometrical features in the millimeters scale or greater. In materials science and engineering, structures like these that are relatively large have two distinct components with different energy properties namely, bulk and surface materials. Bulk components occupy a majority of the implant’s volume and determine the strength properties of the device while surface materials comprise a tiny fraction but usually dictate the biocompatibility and tissue-integration capacities of the exogenous construct.