Durability of dental and orthopaedic prostheses

Presentation

The orthopaedic and dental prostheses examined here are mainly hip prostheses, knee prostheses and dental implants.

These devices share this common trait of being subjected to high mechanical sollicitations, in potentially corrosive environments. Besides, they must answer to multiple requirements (integration in the biological envirenment, resistance to mechanical loads, to wear...).

I2B group is specially interested in simulating the lifetime of theses prostheses (particularly ceramic devices) submitted to multiple sollicitations (for example, wear + fatigue + hydrothermal degradation). The emphasize is put on the degradation mechanisms due to each one of these sollicitations, and to the interactions between these degradation mechanisms.

 Experimental means used here vary from autoclaves, hip simulator and mechanical testing to microstructural characterisation by XRD and SEM.

Typical publications

L. Gremillard et al., Combining aging and wear to assess the durability of zirconia-based ceramic heads for total hip arthroplasty, Acta Biomaterialia 2013, 9 (7) pp. 7545–7555

J. Chevalier et al., Low-temperature degradation in zirconia with a porous surface, 2011, Acta Biomaterialia 7 (7) , pp. 2986-2993

Team: J. Chevalier, L. Gremillard, S. Meille, D. Fabregue