Munoz A.I., Mischler S. (Eds.) Inter-Laboratory Study on Electrochemical Methods for the Characterization of CoCrMo Biomedical Alloys in Simulated Body Fluids

Maney Publishing, 2011. — 124 p. — (European Federation of Corrosion Publications Number 61). — ISBN: 978-1-907625-00-8.This book is part of a series of books published by the European Federation of Corrosion (EFC).
European Federation of Corrosion was founded in 1955 with the purpose of promoting European co-operation in the fields of research into corrosion and corrosion prevention.
This paper reports the results of an inter-laboratory investigation evaluating the reproducibility of electrochemical test protocols commonly used in research assessing the corrosion behaviour of biomedical CoCrMo alloys used for artificial joints.
Fifteen corrosion laboratories from seven European countries and from Japan successfully participated in this study endorsed by the COST533 Action ‘Materials for Improved Wear Resistance of Total Artificial Joints’ and by the European Federation of Corrosion, WP18 Biotribocorrosion.
Despite the good qualitative agreement on the general corrosion behaviour found among the participants, shortcomings in experimental protocol and data extraction procedures caused much scatter in the corrosion rates determined for the investigated alloy. From a practical point of view, this work has shown that the present state-of-the-art does not allow discrimination between negligible and large releases of hazardous corrosion products into the body.
This work stresses the importance of developing improved corrosion test protocols for reliable prediction of long-term material release from biomedical implants and to gain a deeper scientific understanding of the reactions involved.