Effect of Sintering Time on Mechanical Properties of Porous Ti-6al-4v Implant

Abstract

Titanium alloy is popular in biomedical application owing to its low density, good biocompatibility (i.e. biological and chemical inertness) and excellent mechanical properties. Due to the high disparity between the implant and bone Young’s moduli, the alloy causes stress shielding in the body. Porous Ti alloy implants have proven to be effective in addressing this issue, so in this work, we created a porous Ti-6Al-4V implant by sieving the as-received Ti-6Al-4V powder into different particle sizes and sintering it without pressure at 980oC for 0.5hrs, 1 hr, and 2hrs up to 5 hrs. The wettability and the mechanical properties of the sintered samples were elucidated using a contact angle measurement setup, nanoindentation, and universal testing machine. The results show that there is a direct relationship between Young’s modulus of the samples and the sintering time.