Aug. 06, 2024
Metals, with their strength and durability, are still regarded as the go-to material for many medical devices. Advantages of using metals include strength, a sterile surface, fracture toughness, electrical conductivity and the combination of both elasticity and rigidity. This is particularly important for metals used in stents (used in blood vessels for dilatation) as they require some elasticity for expansion while also remaining rigid when dilated. Most important is safety, and metals implanted in tissues must not show any toxicity or metal ion dissolution by corrosion or wear.
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Due to their non-oxidisation properties, stainless steel and cobalt chrome alloys are the optimum choice of metal for medical devices, along with titanium. Nitinol, a metal alloy of nickel and titanium, is popular due to its superelastic and &#;shape memory&#; properties. Additionally, coil springs used in catheters use platinum iridium, platinum tungsten, and tungsten for radiopacity.
Stainless steel is the most versatile metal used in medical devices due to its strength and corrosion resistance properties. The most common alloys used for medical device applications are 302, 304V, 304LV and 316LVM. These alloys are made up of between 17 to 20% chromium and between 8 to 15% nickel. The presence of chromium provides corrosion resistance by forming a chromium oxide film on the surface of the alloy.
Typical applications include stylets, catheters, guidewires, springs, needles, orthodontics, bone pins, skin closure staples and orthopedic cables.
Titanium is stronger, lighter and more corrosion resistant than standard grades of stainless steel. Pure titanium promotes osseointegration, meaning that bone can grow into the material, further helping to anchor implants in the body.
For pure titanium, typical end uses include pacing leads, needles, sutures, ligature clips and orthopedic applications.
For alloyed titanium, applications often include springs, surgical staples, ligature clips, orthopedic cables, orthopedic pins and screws and orthodontic appliances.
Nitinol is a family of alloys consisting of nickel and titanium. It is extremely corrosion resistant and demonstrates excellent biocompatibility. Nitinol exhibits superelasticity and/or shaped memory effect due to the crystalline structure of the material. The ability to remember and return to a specified shape after deformation when exposed to a predetermined temperature has been a gamechanger in the medical device industry. If surgeons need to navigate in particularly tight areas, nitinol has both flexibility to change shape as needed and the durability to endure considerable amounts of strain (8%).
Common applications of nitinol include guidewires, stents, forming mandrels, stone retrieval baskets, orthodontic files, and arch wires.
The most common superalloys being used in the medical device industry are cobalt-chromium based. These high-performance materials offer strength, fatigue resistance, ductility, good biocompatibility, and corrosion resistance. The most commons alloys are MP35N®, L-605, Elgiloy® and FWM&#;
Typical end uses for superalloys include stents, pacing leads, surgical clips, vena cava filters, orthopedic cables and spinal rods and screws.
Custom Wire Technologies (CWT) is a US-based manufacturer of medical wire solutions with over 50 years of industry experience, implementation of the very latest technologies, and works with all the above-mentioned alloys. From custom core wires and coils to K-wires, Steinmann pins to fixation devices, CWT provides its customers with custom manufactured medical components using a range of certified materials. The main alloys that CWT works with are stainless steel 304V and 316LVM, and Nitinol.
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You&#;re no doubt familiar with the term alloy, but maybe not some of the intricacies of their characteristics. We rarely use pure metals, other than in decorative or catalytic applications - they&#;re just not very strong compared to alloys.
Alloys are metals made up of two or more elemental metallic constituents, often with non-metal additions. The addition of various elements to a pure metal&#;s lattice structure enables metals to have properties that they do not have in their pure forms. Typically, alloys are stronger, harder, more durable and in many cases, more corrosion-resistant than their pure metal counterparts.
Alloys have a lot of different compositions. You see properties of some of the modifying additions &#;adopted&#; by the mixture. The primary element in the alloy is typically a material that can accept dissolution of other metals to a degree, to avoid regionalization and disuniformity.
Examples of alloys include steel, brass and aluminum alloys, such as aluminum , which is one of the most common alloys used by Xometry customers for CNC machined parts. Alloys are used in a wide range of applications, from infrastructure and vehicles to consumer goods and medical equipment. In this article, we will explain what an alloy is and review the different types, compositions, and applications of alloys.
An alloy is a material composed of a metallic base, usually the large majority component, and additional metal or non-metal components that are added as property modifiers. Alloys are manufactured and carefully tuned by experiment to deliver desirable properties that are not present in the primary material.
Many alloys are made purely of metals, but non-metal additions such as Silicon, Sulfur, Carbon, Nitrogen, and other light elements are commonly used as property adjusters.
Alloys have been used since as early as BCE. The first known alloys were brass (Copper and Zinc) and bronze (Copper and Tin). Both of these likely originated from early metallurgical learning, where two ores of different compositions were smelted together. We will never know if the first alloys were the result of brilliance or mistake, but what followed is the entire history of metallurgy and our technological society.
Notably, the element Nickel was not isolated until the 19th Century, but its presence was felt in some Copper deposits, which, when smelted, formed cupro-nickel. These ores were often described as &#;having the devil in them&#; as the Nickel content made the Copper very hard to work. Nick is an old word for the devil.
Brass and the much more serviceable bronze both alter the soft and ductile nature of Copper to deliver harder, tougher, and more resilient materials - and in the case of bronze, the ability to hold an edge. Bronze was the first weapons-grade metal, and it destroyed empires. The best bronze in ancient Europe came from Cyprus, and the Mycenaeans, Greeks, and Romans built their empires on it. Today, brass and bronze are still frequently used to create parts and components; you can find them as auto-quotable options within Xometry&#;s instant quoting engine.
In about 1,600 BCE, wrought iron and cast iron began to be produced. Iron is much harder to extract from the ore, and it is unlikely that it was refined by accident. We have experimental metallurgists from 4,000 years ago to thank for it. Pure iron is soft, ductile and malleable and really not of much utility. The big step comes in smelting and working the Iron with a pretty high Carbon content, to alter its structure. The first Carbon is used as a reducing agent in the smelt, so it became an alloying agent by stealth. Cast and then hot-worked (wrought) Iron displaced bronze, and empires fell.
Iron and the alloy family then remained mostly unchanged for 3,000 years, other than a few highlights:
It really wasn&#;t until the Industrial Revolution in the 18-19th centuries that metallurgy became a formal science, delivering many of the alloys commonly used today. Advances in chemistry allowed the isolation of metallic elements such as Manganese, Nickel, and Chromium, Aluminum, Titanium, Magnesium and other elements used in alloys today. The Industrial Revolution is one of my favorite periods of history and continues to shape our lives today.
Alloys are merged materials composed of a primary base element combined with various secondary elements. The base element provides the fundamental structure and typically the solubility medium that disperses the other components uniformly, while the secondary elements are added in specific proportions to adjust and bequeath desirable properties of the final material. The resulting alloy inherits a summary of the characteristics of all its constituents and in many cases, unexpected cooperative gains that none of the individual constituents display, leading to selectively improved performance.
Alloys are made by smelting and blending the base metal and additional elements (metals and/or non-metals) and allowing them to cool. The admixing is often performed in the melt, but many non-metallic additives can be worked in after initial solidification, by various methods. Two primary types of alloys are used; substitutional and interstitial alloys.
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