ABSTRACT
The bioactive hydroxyapatite (HAp) coating on metallic implants provides excellent biocompatibility and biostability to enhance the growth of bone tissues. It is therefore obvious that the in-vivo stability and reliability of the coated implant will depend predominantly upon the local mechanical properties of the coating. Despite the wealth of literature [1-6], there has not been any systematic study of local nanomechanical properties for microplasma-sprayed HAp (MIPS-HAp) coating on SS316L substrates. Therefore, we shall try to understand how the applied load affects the local mechanical properties, specifically the nanohardness (H) and Young’s modulus (E), of the MIPS-HAp coatings on SS316L substrates. The details of coating preparation have already been given elsewhere [7] and are summarized in Chapter 9.
