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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: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday July 26 2016, @08:01PM
Just about all titanium medical device laser jobs are partial pen. Mainly butt and fillet type welds to secure pins or tool to a handle/shaft. Very easy to weld on an XY table or rotary. The heart pump job was an example of a partial pen job that has difficult geometry to easily shield. So we just stuck it in a glove box and called it a day.
The electron beam stuff is where the fun begins. Full pen welds up to two inches deep with a bead width of only ~0.2 inches. And since it's in a vacuum, shield gas is a non issue. Though only a hand full of our Ti medical jobs are EB. Usually you get an engineer from a med device company who hears about EB, gets all excited, and then learns the cost difference.