Ceramic wear performance

The wear performance of the sliding couple ceramic femoral ball/acetabular cup liner is of crucial importance because the lubricating synovial fluid present... 

The wear performance of the sliding couple ceramic femoral ball/acetabular cup liner is crucially important, as the synovial fluid lubricant that is present in the natural hip joint is absent from the artiflcial system. Hence, the coefficient of friction must be as low as possible. Data relating to the linear wear of clinically established wear couples, obtained during wear screening tests, are hsted in Table 10.8 (Heimann and WiUmann, 1998). 

Spinelli, M., Affatato, S., Corvi, A., and Viceconti, M. (2009) Ceramic-on-ceramic vs. metal-on-metal in total hip arthroplasty (THA) do 36-mm diameters exhibit comparable wear performance Materialwiss. Werkstoffiedi., 40 (1-2),... 

The well-documented wear performance of PEEK and its compounds has led to considerable interest in its use for arthroplasty bearing surfaces. Target applications include acetabular cups in hip joints. Interest has been driven by the well-documented deficiencies of the existing metals, ceramics and polymers and there are numerous papers examining the wear performance of PAEK for these applications [12-16]. Wear is superior to conventional materials such as UHMWPE. Recently Invibio has developed grades suitable for wear applications against hard counterfaces such as metals and ceramics [17, 18]. 

Tribological Behavior. Tribological performance of ceramics, which includes friction, adhesion, wear, and lubricated behavior of two soHd materials in contact, has been reviewed (52). 

At this point, experiments must be performed. Experimental results for the erosive wear of the selected candidate ceramic materials in coal slurries are presented in Table 8.4. Notice that the wear rate has a very rough inverse correlation with which is consistent with some of the descriptions of erosive wear from the previous section. Any of these ceramic materials is suitable for the piping and pump components based solely on wear rate, with the lowest wear rate for SiC being the most attractive. Formability and economic criteria can be applied to assist in the final material selection. 

Using a spreadsheet function or analysis tool, perform a Smdent s f-test to compare the mean values of each of the first four wear rates with that of gold (the last value in the column) at an agreed-upon confidence level—for example, 95% confidence level. If you have not yet learned how to do Student s f-test, check out any book on elementary statistics, and learn how to do a f-test, or use the Help menus in your spreadsheet package. The goal is to determine if the mean wear rates of the four ceramic materials are statistically different from the wear rate for gold. If done correctly, you will have performed four separate f-tests in this step. 

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