The effect of patterned titanium substrates on the properties of silver-doped hydroxyapatite coatings

This paper reports the effect of substrate nano/micro-structure design on the grain size, mechanical properties and surface wettability of nanostructured radio frequency (RF) magnetron sputter-deposited silver-containing hydroxyapatite (Ag-HA) coatings containing 0.13-0.36 wt.% silver. The results of this study revealed that the Ag-HA coating microstructure could be designed by controlling the pre-treated surface topography of titanium. The nano/micro-patterned surfaces of titanium were prepared by sand-blasting followed by acid-etching. The size of the nano-patterns on the surface of titanium was also affected by the sand-blasting procedure; namely, the lower the pressure was, the larger the size of the nano-structures and the distance between them. The effect of the coating grain size on the surface wettability and physico-mechanical properties of the biocomposites was revealed. The hydrophobic properties were imparted to the rough titanium by a nanostructured Ag-HA coating. Although according to the XRD patterns the coatings were mainly composed of HA, some differences in the morphology were observed. Therefore, the decreased wettability of the Ag-HA coatings could be explained by taking into account the different grain sizes of the films rather than the changes to the surface chemistry. Nanoindentation studies revealed that in the case of the Ag-HA-coated samples, smaller grains resulted in significantly higher nanohardness and Young's modulus.