Investigation of Annealing Temperature Effect on Structure and Biofunction in Metal Alloy Implant Production.

In this paper, for the first time, the nanostructures of metal alloy Ti6Al4V implants produced by the selective laser melting (SLM) technique were examined using the SAXS method, depending on the annealing temperature, and the relationship between these nanostructures and bioactivity was examined for the first time. Annealing process in this technique increases the durability and makes alloys more suitable for processing. In this study, in order to understand the effect of annealing temperature on the nanostructure, five identical samples without annealing and five identical samples annealed at different temperatures (T = 780, 840, 1040 °C) were examined and compared with each other structurally. Beside of nanoscopic SAXS analyses, SEM imaging and macrophotography techniques were also used as supporting evidence. Additionally, antimicrobial test was applied to determine the antimicrobial properties of the samples, too. As a result, the best annealing temperature (840 °C) was determined to prepare implant materials with uniform and homogeneously distributed nanospherical (R_g = 13.4 ± 0.3 nm radius) formations. The morphologies, sizes, radial electron densities, and distance distributions of the nanoaggregations in the implant content, determined as a result of SAXS data evaluations, constituted nanoscopic findings. It was also shown that this nanostructured implant has an antibiofilm effect against S.aureus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]