Electrochemical behavior of CoCrMo alloy for dental applications in acidic artificial saliva containing albumin.

The electrochemical properties of CoCrMo alloy immersed in different artificial saliva with or without Ca ²⁺ and albumin were studied by open circuit potential (OCP), electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and potentiodynamic polarization (PP), and meanwhile the microstructures features, phase identification and chemical composition of the alloy were analyzed by SEM, EDS, XRD and RA-IR to further understand the electrochemical behavior of the alloy. The results indicated that the self-passivation behavior of the alloy occurred universally and was obviously distinct with each other in different acidic artificial saliva. No phase transformation was observed and the oxide layer and corrosion products exhibited amorphous nature. There was an obvious complexation of the adsorbed albumin with the alloy, and the adsorption capacity of albumin increased with the prolongation of immersion time. The adsorbed albumin presenting black stripped spots had a certain inhibition to the formation of passivation film, and Ca ²⁺ in saliva promoted the further adsorption of albumin as an intermediate bridge, going against the improvement of the corrosion resistance of passivation film/alloy system. In addition, the passivation state of the alloy surface was changed by different methods to investigate the adsorption behavior of albumin and its influence on the further passivation behavior in depth. Hitherto, we tried to propose a model to explain the dynamic adsorption process of albumin and its influencing mechanism on the growth behavior of passivation film.
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