Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
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, said her team had made the discovery while working on unconventional magnets made from titanium and gold.
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".
Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36855705
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Tuesday July 26 2016, @04:35PM
I'm not so sure about dental work either - with dental work you have two factors to consider - wear of the replacement material, and wear of the opposing tooth enamel because of the replacement material.
As it happens, one of the reasons gold crowns are popular among dentists is that they have almost exactly the same wear properties as tooth enamel - ceramic crowns are considerably harder and more wear resistant, which is great for them, but causes much accelerated wear of the enamel of the opposing teeth.