Tribological studies of different bioimplant materials for orthopedic application using Taguchi experimental design

In this research ball on disc wear tests have been carried out with ASTM G-99 standard at room temperature in simulated body fluid. The tribological property such as the coefficient of friction and wear weight loss was studied by using the Taguchi design of experiments. The design of the experiment was done using L8 orthogonal array to determine the collective contribution of the wear parameters. An analysis of variance demonstrated that the individual contribution of type of material factor was 97.15% and 66.66% for the coefficient of friction and wear weight loss respectively, which is the highest individual contribution as compared to other factors. It was concluded that the coefficient of friction and wear weight loss is mainly influenced by type of material factor. The analysis of the signal-to-noise ratio shows that the optimal coefficient of friction and wear weight loss was obtained with CoCrMo material at an applied normal load of 5 N with a sliding velocity of 0.05 m/s for a track diameter of 30 mm. To check the accuracy of results a confirmation test was carried out which indicates that predicted values are very close to the experimental values and the model is significant to predict the coefficient of friction. The results showed that the coefficient of friction and wear weight loss increases with increasing the applied load and sliding velocity. The microstructure of all substrates materials was analyzed using a scanning electron microscope. Wear track study showed that adhesive dominant wear mechanism for all four different substrate materials.