A novel tribological study on DLC-coated micro-dimpled orthopedics implant interface

This study investigates a tribological performance of diamond like carbon (DLC) coated micro dimpled prosthesis heads against ceramic cups in a novel pendulum hip joint simulator. The simulator enables determining friction coefficient and viscous effects of a concave shaped specimen interface (conformal contact). Two types of DLC such as hydrogenated amorphous carbon (a-C:H) and tetrahedral amorphous carbon (Ta-C) and one set of micro dimple (diameter of 300 µm, depth of 70 µm, and pitch of 900 µm) were fabricated on metallic prosthesis heads. The experiment results reveal a significant friction coefficient reduction to the ‘dimpled a-C:H/ceramic’ prosthesis compared to a ‘Metal (CoCr)/ceramic’ prosthesis because of their improved material and surface properties and viscous effect. The post-experiment surface analysis displays that the dimpled a-C:H yielded a minor change in the surface roughness, and generated a larger sizes of wear debris (40–200 nm sized, equivalent diameter), a size which could be certainly stored in the dimple, thus likely to reducing their possible third body abrasive wear rate. Thus, dimpled a:C–H can be used as a ‘metal on ceramic hip joint interface’, whereas the simulator can be utilized as an advanced bio-tribometer.