Wear behaviour of tetragonal zirconia polycrystal with a porous surface

The interest in zirconia as an excellent technical material is growing for a huge field of engineering and research applications, where some of them include rough and/or porous surfaces. Nevertheless, the wear resistance of yttria-stabilized zirconia coated with a porous layer is poorly documented. The aim of this work was to produce porous layers (powder with different average sizes - 40 μm, 70 μm, 100 μm) over a dense zirconia substrate and assess their tribological behaviour against an Al2O3 ball. The porous layers were removed from the substrate during the wear tests. No significant differences were found for the coefficient of friction and the wear rate of the different groups (p > 0.05).