Design of β-Titanium microstructures for implant materials

The present work addresses the design of beta-Titanium alloy, TNTZ, microstructure to be used in biomedical applications as implant materials. The TNTZ alloy has recently started to attract interest in the area of biomedical engineering as it can provide elastic modulus values that are comparable to the modulus of the human bone. Such a match between the implant and bone significantly increases the compatibility and functionality of the implant material with the human body. Experimental studies reveal that the modulus of TNTZ varies around 55-60 GPa, whereas the bones typically have modulus around 25-30 GPa. Therefore, to achieve a better match in modulus values and further improve the compatibility of the implant, we present a computational design study. As the properties of materials are significantly affected by the underlying microstructure, we focus on identifying the optimum microstructures. Our goal is to minimize the difference between the elastic modulus values of the microstructure and the bone. To ensure the manufacturability of such an optimum design solution, we analyze the microstructural evolution during deformation processing to obtain the optimum microstructure that can be processed. The outcomes of our analysis demonstrated that the elastic modulus of TNTZ can be as low as 48 GPa.