A super-hard metal has been made in the laboratory by melting together titanium and gold by a team of US researchers led by Romanian-born Emilia Morosan from Rice University in Huston, bbc.com informs quoting a study published in the “Science Advances” journal.
The alloy is the hardest known metallic substance compatible with living tissues, say US physicists. According to them, the material is four times harder than pure titanium and has applications in making longer-lasting medical implants.
Conventional knee and hip implants have to be replaced after about 10 years due to wear and tear.
Romanian Professor Emilia Morosas said her team had made the discovery while working on unconventional magnets made from titanium and gold.
The new materials needed to be made into powders to check their purity, but beta-Ti3Au, as it is known, was too tough to be ground in a diamond-coated mortar and pestle.
The material “showed the highest hardness of all Ti-Au [titanium-gold] alloys and compounds, but also compared to many other engineering alloys”, said Prof Morosan.
She said the hardness of the substance, together with its higher biocompatibility, made it a “next generation compound for substantively extending the lifetime of dental implants and replacement joints”.
It may also have applications in the drilling industry, the sporting goods industry and many other potential fields, she added.
The gold-titanium alloy is a cubic compound with a particular arrangement of atoms found when metals are combined at high temperatures.
Titanium is one of the few metals that human bone is able to grow around firmly, allowing it to be used widely in medicine and dentistry.
Emilia Morosan was born in Suceava, northern Romania in 1976. She graduated the Physics Faculty at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Iasi and got her PhD title at Iowa University in 2005.
After working for a while at Princeton Univesity, she became assistant professor of physics, chemistry and astronomy at Rice University (Houston, Texas).
The Romanian researcher has been awarded by US President Barack Obama in 2010 within the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) gala.