Additive manufacturing of magnesium alloys and its biocompatibility

A new class of alloys called magnesium-based alloys has the unique property of being biodegradable inside the humans and animals. In addition to being biodegradable, Mg-based alloys are suitable materials for creating medical implants for utilization in orthopaedic and traumatology therapies due to their inherent biocompatibility and bone-like density. Due to the combination of bioimplant design and manufacturing techniques appropriate to particular applications, additive manufacturing (AM) and three-dimensional (3D) printing now offer a potential production approach. Magnesium (Mg) use in biomedical field is rising year by year due to rising needs in the biomedical sector. In this biomedical field, additive manufacturing (AM) gives you the freedom to create components with complicated shapes and good dimensional stability. Additionally, it opens up a new opportunity for using unique component architectures, expanding the uses for magnesium alloy. The numerous AM techniques utilised to create biomedical implants from magnesium-based alloys were rigorously examined in current study, along with the materials, microscopic structure, mechanical characteristics, biocompatibility, biodegradability and antibacterial properties. It was observed that powder bed fusion (PBF) is a very good method for manufacturing magnesium implants as topology can be carefully controlled in powder bed fusion process. It was observed that selective laser melting process offer more functionality than selective laser sintering process because Mg is completely melted and penetrated deeply during selective laser melting process. Selective laser melting has advantages such as smaller grains, a homogenous phase distribution, an improved solid solution rapid solidification and considerable cooling rates. In this article the difficulties and problems associated with AM methods were recognised from the viewpoints of bioimplant design, characteristics, and applications. Critical exploration is also done on the difficulties and potential of AM of magnesium alloys.