I had a hip replacement eight years ago and love it - the joint was bone on bone and I tried alternative healing but nothing worked. Acupuncture was great for pain management but the medicines did nothing to regrow the joint. Titanium is the metal of choice for replacement joints - it is bio-compatible and bone tissue will grow on it so after a month or two of healing, the joint is as strong as the original. Now this - from Rice University:
Titanium + gold = new gold standard for artificial joints
Titanium is the leading material for artificial knee and hip joints because it’s strong, wear-resistant and nontoxic, but an unexpected discovery by Rice University physicists shows that the gold standard for artificial joints can be improved with the addition of some actual gold.
“It is about 3-4 times harder than most steels,” said Emilia Morosan, the lead scientist on a new study in Science Advances that describes the properties of a 3-to-1 mixture of titanium and gold with a specific atomic structure that imparts hardness. “It’s four times harder than pure titanium, which is what’s currently being used in most dental implants and replacement joints.”
Morosan, a physicist who specializes in the design and synthesis of compounds with exotic electronic and magnetic properties, said the new study is “a first for me in a number of ways. This compound is not difficult to make, and it’s not a new material.”
In fact, the atomic structure of the material — its atoms are tightly packed in a “cubic” crystalline structure that’s often associated with hardness — was previously known. It’s not even clear that Morosan and former graduate student Eteri Svanidze, the study’s lead co-author, were the first to make a pure sample of the ultrahard “beta” form of the compound. But due to a couple of lucky breaks, they and their co-authors are the first to document the material’s remarkable properties.
The paper can be found at the AAAS Science Advances: High hardness in the biocompatible intermetallic compound β-Ti3Au
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