Characterization of the resistance of pyrolytic carbon to abrasive wear

Si-alloyed pyrolitic carbon (PyC) is currently employed in many biomedical devices, due to its fairly good biological compatibility and non biodegradeability. For prosthetic heart valve applications, required to operate safely for many years, the resistance to abrasive wear is one of the limiting factors which must be accurately evaluated. The present study reports on abrasive wear testing of Ti/PyC and PyC/PyC sliding couples. For both couples it was found that the wear behaviour can be shifted from a low wear regime, characterised by very small wear rates and reduced scatter, to a high wear regime, characterised by high wear rates and high scatter, due to the presence of particle contamination coming from the environment and/or from the specimen polishing process. Actual biomedical devices, particularly heart valves, should not experience the high wear regime, due to the absence of any hard particle contamination source. The wear observed in these items is in fact minimal and may depend on mechanisms other than abrasive wear. In these conditions the experimental evaluation of the wear behaviour should definetely be performed by tests on actual devices.