Material Processing and Design of Biodegradable Metal Matrix Composites for Biomedical Applications

In recent years, biodegradable metallic materials have played an important role in biomedical applications. However, as typical for the metal materials, their structure, general properties, preparation technology and biocompatibility are hard to change. Furthermore, biodegradable metals are susceptible to excessive degradation and subsequent disruption of their mechanical integrity; this phenomenon limits the utility of these biomaterials. Therefore, the use of degradable metals, as the base material to prepare metal matrix composite materials, it is an excellent alternative to solve the problems above described. Biodegradable metals can thus be successfully combined with other materials to form biodegradable metallic matrix composites for biomedical applications and functions. The present article describes the processing methods currently available to design biodegradable metal matrix composites for biomedical applications and provides an overview of the current existing biodegradable metal systems. At the end, the manuscript presents and discusses the challenges and future research directions for development of biodegradable metallic matrix composites for biomedical purposes.