Guide on Ceramics Usage in the Medical Industry

If you have ever heard of knee replacement surgery and wondered with which material the knee joints are made up of then the answer to that is the ceramic material. Also hip replacement surgery is done to replace the damaged hip bones because of accidents or old age. The material used nowadays in those hip bones is advanced ceramics.

The ceramics which are used in the medical industry are vastly different from what is used in the ball bearings or the dental industry. The ball bearings use the silica nitride or the silica carbide as the ceramics. This material has the ability to withstand large amounts of heat and that alone helps in reduced damage to the mechanical parts.

The medical industry's usage of ceramics is different in nature because of the fact that they use what is called as oxide ceramics which are the aluminum oxide or the zirconium oxide.

The basic need of the medical usage especially in hip and knee joints is that they should be strong and hard and also very stiff. In fact the ceramics used in the hips and the bones are so much harder that the only material which will be harder than them will be diamond. Also the other need is that no material or chemical should be able to corrode them or even have any sort of fungus formation or any bacterial germination in them. The reason is not hard to fathom as these will reside in the human body for almost 10 -20 years and there is no way of telling whether they are being corroded inside the body.

Now these oxide ceramics are chemically inert in the best possible manner which means that they cannot be damaged whatsoever.

The other advantage of the ceramic material used in the hip and knees treatment is that these cannot wear off easily and that means there are no particles which splinter off.

The biggest disadvantage about the ceramic material is that during the extreme stress and inaccurate stress conditions these materials can burst and splinter off the parts through out the whole body. That usually will happen in case there is extreme pressure that is deployed at incorrect angles or because of long usage say about 15 to 20 years.

All said the ceramics definitely have a lot of uses in the medical industry and further research is being done whereby even minimum amount of damage and wear and tear that occurs can be reduced and that will eliminate any need of further checks once these parts are put inside the body.

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