Thermal Plasma Spraying as a New Approach for Preparation of Zinc Biodegradable Scaffolds: A Complex Material Characterization

Zinc based materials have been studied as candidates for the fabrication of biodegradable implants. For applications in orthopedics, porous materials with reduced modulus of elasticity are desirable. Fabrication of porous zinc is challenging due to several processing difficulties, such as low melting point, easy evaporation and high reactivity with many porogen agents. In this work, we prepared a porous zinc sheet by thermal plasma spraying with a porosity of 16.8%. Mechanical, corrosion and biological characteristics of the prepared material were studied in detail. The porous zinc possessed reduced moduli of elasticity (2-6 GPa) and relatively high values of strengths (12-55 MPa—depending on the loading mode). The corrosion rate of the porous zinc was approximately 0.1 mm/a, and the extracts showed excellent murine L929 cell viability. The results suggest that thermal plasma spraying is usable for preparation of biodegradable porous zinc scaffolds.