Advances In Medical Thermal Spray Coating Technology and Materials

The Thermal Spray coating of implantable medical devices has a long- and well-established history. In fact, the existing coating technology and material combinations have changed little over the past 20 years, while Oerlikon Metco remains a leading global supplier of medical thermal spray systems, materials, equipment and consumables. Oerlikon Metco will introduce its new SinplexPro CA (Controlled Atmosphere) VPS cascaded arc gun for the successful medical thermal spray coating of titanium and titanium alloy powders.

Along with the well know advantages of the cascaded arc thermal spray process, which include arc and process stability, increased DE plus the elimination for the need to use helium as a secondary gas. We will demonstrate with several examples of how the new Argon-Only Sinplex CA gun coating process can replace the existing F4VB gun platform and offer significant enhanced coating capabilities using our irregular shaped titanium and titanium alloy powders. These include increased (2x) coating thickness and higher roughness without any loss of coating porosity or adhesion strength, plus powder optimization by replacing the current ‘duel’ (topcoat / bond coat) powders coating strategy with a ‘single’ coating powder coating strategy.