Executive Summary : | In a country like India, demographic, lifestyle factors, and improving healthcare facilities, provides tremendous potential for orthopedic industries. Total hip replacement (THR) is an effective orthopedic surgical procedure to confront osteoarthritis and other bone degenerative issues in the hip joint to restore bone joint mobility, relieve pain and enhance the quality of life. Even though, the hip implant replacement is a successful surgical procedure, the hip implants prematurely fail due to aseptic loosening, infection, dislocation, and fracture. Aseptic loosening is taking a major contribution of about 58% due to material degradation. This material degradation is due to corrosion and tribocorrosion. Despite using various alternate materials and manufacturing methods, the average life span of a hip implant is only up to 8.5 years, which is critical for patients under the middle age group. Wear debris generated by corrosion and tribocorrosion processes contributes to local adverse tissue reactions and forms pseudotumors. Therefore, it is important to deal with tribocorrosion in hip implants to make them last longer and keep up with the current life expectancy. Various surface modification techniques, such as surface treatments and surface coatings, are used to improve the corrosion and tribocorrosion performance. The surface treatment did not give a significant improvement in performance. Surface coating gave a significant improvement, but these coatings are delaminated in the body environment and lead to failure of the components. The adhesion between the coating and implant surface failed due to an abrupt change in various properties. Current studies are focusing on functionally graded coating by varying a particular elemental proportion. In this proposed project intends to develop a novel functional gradient zirconium-silicon-oxynitride coating by arranging various elements in order to achieve graded properties. The development of the functionally gradient coating aids in improving the corrosion and tribocorrosion performance of the implant materials. This will prevent or delay the premature failure of the implant and reduce the number of revision surgeries on young patients. Hence, it avoids unnecessary hospitalization and surgical procedures. |