A Compact Fretting Device for Testing of Biomaterials by Means of Thin Layer Activation

Thin layer activation has been applied to measure fretting wear release of medical grade Ti-6Al-4V in the sub-micro gram range and wear rates in the order of magnitude of 10-7 ng/cycle. Thin layer activation allows to define an area of interest by local irradiation and avoids artefacts of fretting effects on specimen grips or elsewhere. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate the suitability of thin layer activation for quantitative measurements of very small material quantities released during fretting experiments. For the present experiments a piezo-electrically driven fretting device is presented that is sufficiently to comply with space restrictions and the requirements of working in a radiation protected environment. The equipment and the applied methodology is described and first results on two sets of experiments of semi-spherical samples fretted against a flat fatigue sample machined form Ti-6Al-4V are presented. Both set of experiments where conducted under nominally identical parameters, the only variation consisting in different surface finishes of the fatigue samples.JRC.I.4-Nanotechnology and Molecular Imagin