Wear Simulation of Alumina‐on‐Alumina Prosthetic Hip Joints Using a Multidirectional Motion Pin‐on‐Disk Device

Abstract

The wear of a state‐of‐the‐art implant alumina against itself was studied with a circularly translating pin‐on‐disk (CTPOD) device, a wear simulator for prosthetic hip joint materials. The direction of sliding changed continually relative to the pin, preventing erroneous uniaxial grooving typical of ordinary pin‐on‐disk devices. The dominating wear mechanism was mild abrasion manifested as a relieflike surface, which agreed with clinical findings. The wear factor ranged from 1 × 10−8 to 6 × 10−8 mm3/(N·m). The CTPOD device, validated earlier for ultrahigh molecular weight polyethylene, was shown to be the first simple wear test device to produce wear similar to that known to occur clinically in alumina‐on‐alumina total hip prostheses.

Tribological Characteristics of Al2O3 Nanocomposites for Joint Prostheses

“…Even though there was not any enhanced of fracture toughness with the addition of TiO 2 and Y-TZP, the values of this property are comparable with those of biomaterials that are currently used, the same with the Hardness Vickers. Also the values for the specific wear rate are lower than the values presented by Saikko et al (22) .…”

RandomPOD—A new method and device for advanced wear simulation of orthopaedic biomaterials

“…This has earlier been shown with the CTPOD principle using ceramic-on-ceramic (Saikko and Keränen, 2002) and metal-on-metal, with and without coating (Joyce and Grigg, 2009). A ball-on-flat contact is preferred.…”

A Hip Wear Simulator with 100 Test Stations

“…It has been shown to produce valid wear also for hard-on-hard couples [24]. With these, it is recommendable to use a ball-on-flat contact and very low loads.…”