Porous Ti6Al4V alloys with enhanced normalized fatigue strength for biomedical applications

In this paper, porous Ti6Al4V alloys for biomedical applications were fabricated by diffusion bonding of alloy meshes. The compression-compression fatigue behavior was studied. It results that porous Ti6Al4V alloys show enhanced normalized fatigue strength which is in the range of 0.5-0.55 at 106 cycles. The porosity has some effect on the absolute S-N curves but minor effect on the normalized S-N curves. The relationship between strain per cycle and number of cycles shows three distinct stages and the value of strain per cycle is constant in stage II. The reasons for the higher normalized fatigue strength of porous Ti6Al4V alloys are discussed based on the fatigue crack initiation and propagation.