Biodegradation performance of ball burnished magnesium alloy in stimulated body fluids for bioresorbable implant applications

Magnesium alloys are found to be potential bioresorbable materials. However, the application range of these alloys as bioresorbable materials has been limited due to rapid degradation in physiological fluids. The current study deals with the enhancement of degradation behavior of Mg Ze41A alloy in SBF solution by ball burnishing. Further, the influence of burnishing parameters on biodegradation rate has been investigated by Tafel plots, polarization resistance, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy and surface morphology analysis of degraded samples. Additionally, the biodegradation rate has been estimated by ANFIS modeling. The biodegradation rate of Mg Ze41A has been reduced from 1.106 mm/yr to 0.367 mm/yr with an improvement of 68.82% at optimum burnishing condition of burnishing force 50 N, burnishing speed 1400 RPM, burnishing feed 125 mm/min and 2 passes. ANOVA analysis has revealed that burnishing force and feed have contributed the most for the enhancement. The shift in degradation potential towards noble direction and reduction in degradation current density in potentiodynamic polarization curves and the highest charge transfer resistance in electrochemical impedance spectroscopy of the burnished samples are observed for burnished samples. The results reveal that ball burnishing process is a potential surface modification method in reducing the biodegradation rate of Mg Ze41A alloy. The ball burnishing has resulted in lowest biodegradation rate at a degradation current density of 5.743 mu A/cm2 and degradation potential of-1.513 V. The ANFIS model developed with 81 fuzzy rules and triangular membership function estimated the biodegradation rate with an accuracy of 95.03%. The decrease in biodegradation rate of ball burnished magnesium substrate in SBF is essentially due to cumulative effect of compressive residual stress, microhardness, surface finish, work hardening and grain refinement.