July 22, 2016 -- A super-hard metal has been made in the laboratory by melting together titanium and gold.
The alloy is the hardest known metallic substance compatible with living tissues, say US physicists.
The
material is four times harder than pure titanium and has applications in making
longer-lasting medical implants, they say.
Conventional
knee and hip implants have to be replaced after about 10 years due to wear and
tear.
Details
of the new metal - an alloy of gold and titanium - are revealed in the journal,
Science Advances.
Prof
Emilia Morosan, of Rice University , Houston
The
new materials needed to be made into powders to check their purity, but
beta-Ti3Au, as it is known, was too tough to be ground in a diamond-coated
mortar and pestle.
The
material "showed the highest hardness of all Ti-Au [titanium-gold] alloys
and compounds, but also compared to many other engineering alloys", said
Prof Morosan.
She
said the hardness of the substance, together with its higher biocompatibility,
made it a "next generation compound for substantively extending the
lifetime of dental implants and replacement joints".
It
may also have applications in the drilling industry, the sporting goods
industry and many other potential fields, she added.
The
gold-titanium alloy is a cubic compound with a particular arrangement of atoms
found when metals are combined at high temperatures.
Titanium is one of the few metals that human bone is able to grow around firmly, allowing it to be used widely in medicine and dentistry.
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