Surface Modification of Ti Implant for Enhancing Biotribology and Cells Attachment
Year: 2020

Implant success strongly depends on the proper integration of bone to biomaterial surface. By the selected retrieval cases, inadequate integration of bone screws was a dominated factor caused failure. The surface modification technology that improve osteointegration by inducing TiO2 nanotubes (NT) on Ti based implants has a potential applications in orthopaedic implants. NT generated by anodization method provide a vertically aligned nanotube structure that enhances the integration between bone tissue and implant surface by improving osteoblasts attachment. Although cells to NT is positive, the mechanical weakness of NT has also been well documented and is an obstacle to its applications. The thesis comprise a detailed method to improve NT mechanical stability, by introducing an interfacial bonding layer at NT bottom and Ti substrate, and retaining vertically aligned nanotubes. The physicochemical properties of this structure optimized TiO2 nanotubes (SO NT) was systematically characterized, the SO NT has been demonstrated with improved biotribological and biocorrosive performance. The uniform hyperfine interfacial bonding layer with nano sized grains exhibited a strong bonding to NT layer and Ti substrate. It was observed, the layer not only effectively dissipates external impacts and shear stress but also acts as a good corrosion resistance barrier to prevent the Ti substrate from corrosion. The SO NT modified bone screw has also demonstrated with enhanced fretting corrosion resistance than NT and pristine Ti6Al4V on screws. Since the elongated osteoblasts were observed on NT and SO NT compared with Ti surface, the nanotubes structure has been shown with promoting of osteoblasts attachment. However, the mechanism of cell nanotubes interactions are largely in controversial. In order to reveal the cell nanomaterial interactions, nanotopographies including Nanoconvex, Nanoconcave and Nanoflat were generated and characterized to evaluate the cell initial attachment behaviour. Human osteoblasts were observed with spindle shape on Nanoconcave, cells on Nanoflat were well spreading but in sphere shape, while the osteoblasts on Nanoconvex were with the minimum spreading areas. Cell materials interface is mediated and influenced by the adsorption of ECM on nanomaterials. Thus, a novel fibronectin adsorption model was proposed by calculating Coulomb's force to illustrate the interact mechanism between protein and material that influence cell behaviours. The achievements of thesis are; 1. Retrieval analyzed two cases of implants failure and pointed out one of dominated failure factor, the lack of osteointegration. 2. Introduce the interfacial bonding layer that significantly improve the biotribological and biocorrosive performance of NT, and generated SO NT. 3. Systematically evaluated the biotribological performance of Ti, NT and SO NT, and propose a novel methodology to quantify the fretting degradation on bone screws. 4. Propose a novel model to estimate the fibronectin adsorption on Nanoflat, Nanoconvex and Nanoconcave by the Coulomb's force calculation.