The effect of calcination temperatures on wear properties of TiO2 coated CP-Ti

• In order to improve wear behavior of CP-Ti, sol–gel coating process was used.
• TiO2 films were deposited on CP-Ti by sol–gel dip coating process and were calcined at various temperatures.
• The influences of calcination temperature on wear performances of TiO2 films were investigated.

Commercially pure titanium (CP-Ti) is commonly used as an implant material especially for orthopedic and dental treatments in biomedical applications. This material shows insufficient tribological properties. Some surface treatments were applied on surface CP-Ti in order to improve tribological properties of the CP-Ti. Among these techniques, sol–gel coating process was used for this purpose. In this study, CP-Ti was coated by TiO2 film with sol–gel dip coating process. Coated samples were calcined at the various temperatures. The effects of calcination temperature on the wear performance of the coated films were observed. It was observed that the hardness, elastic modulus, surface roughness, friction coefficient and wear resistance values of coated samples were higher than the uncoated CP-Ti values. Also, these properties of coated samples increased with increasing of calcination temperature. The intensity of the rutile-TiO2 phase increased with the calcination temperatures. It was determined that rutile-TiO2 structure showed self-lubrication like behavior. The best tribological properties were obtained from the sample calcinated at 900 °C.