Compression fatigue behavior and failure mechanism of porous titanium for biomedical applications

Porous titanium and its alloys are believed to be one of the most attractive biomaterials for orthopedic implant applications. In the present work, porous pure titanium with 50-70% porosity and different pore size was fabricated by diffusion bonding. Compression fatigue behavior was systematically studied along the out-of-plane direction. It resulted that porous pure titanium has anisotropic pore structure and the microstructure is fine-grained equiaxed α phase with a few twins in some α grains. Porosity and pore size have some effect on the S-N curve but this effect is negligible when the fatigue strength is normalized by the yield stress. The relationship between normalized fatigue strength and fatigue life conforms to a power law. The compression fatigue behavior is characteristic of strain accumulation. Porous titanium experiences uniform deformation throughout the entire sample when fatigue cycle is lower than a critical value (N_T). When fatigue cycles exceed N_T, strain accumulates rapidly and a single collapse band forms with a certain angle to the loading direction, leading to the sudden failure of testing sample. Both cyclic ratcheting and fatigue crack growth contribute to the fatigue failure mechanism, while the cyclic ratcheting is the dominant one. Porous titanium possesses higher normalized fatigue strength which is in the range of 0.5-0.55 at 10⁶ cycles. The reasons for the higher normalized fatigue strength were analyzed based on the microstructure and fatigue failure mechanism.