Titanium Medical Screws

Titanium metal is used for medical and dental implants due to its strength, non-corrosive properties and bonding ability with soft tissue and bone. In order to encourage this bonding process and to give the tissue a good surface to adhere to, the metal needs to have an anchor profile. This very similar to preparing a surface for paint or coating. A rougher surface will provide more surface for bonding.

The titanium bone screws in the picture show a before and after blasting. These screws have a very smooth surface (before on left) after the machining process. Since the size of the screw is very small, it is difficult to blast the screws one at a time. A Tumble Blast system was used to create the lightly etched profile (blasted part on right) on the surface. The tumble blasting batch process allows for a large number of parts to be blasted at one time in a short period.

The surface finish shown was accomplished in about 10 minutes using 60 Mesh White Aluminum Oxide. This grade of media (99.5% pure aluminum oxide) was used to prevent contamination of the metal surface and provide a consistent and uniform finish from part to part.

Titanium Stents

Finishing medical parts requires very stringent testing and results to ensure that the parts are deburred properly. Titanium stents are inserted into arteries to keep them open. A properly deburred edge and smooth surface finish is absolutely necessary to ensure that the medical part works exactly as expected.

Titanium is a hard metal and is often deburred in a vibratory tumbler with Ceramic Media. The size and shape will depend on the geometry of the part and size of the openings. Adding a medium size grit such as Aluminum Oxide will increase the abrasiveness of the tumbling process and provide a smooth, rounded edge. If embedding of the grit is of concern, using a Ceramic Media that is aluminum oxide free (i.e., KDF Bond) with an addition of Silicon Carbide will also produce excellent results.