Mechanically assisted crevice corrosion (MACC) of head-neck modular taper junctions is prevalent in virtually all head neck tapers in use today. To date, no clear in vitro tests of design, material or surgical elements of the modular taper system have been reported that show which factors principally affect MACC in these tapers. Possible elements include seating load, head-neck offset, surface roughness, taper engagement length, material combination, angular mismatch, and taper diameter. The goals of this study were to use an incremental fretting corrosion test method1 to assess the above 7 elements using a design of experiments approach. The hypothesis is that only one or two principal factors affect fretting corrosion. A 27-2 design of experiment test (7 factors, ¼ factorial, n=32 total runs, 16 samples per condition per factor) was conducted. Factors included: Assembly Force (100, 4000N), Head Offset (1.5, 12 mm), Taper Locking Position (Mouth, Throat), Stem Taper Length (0.44, 0.54 in), Stem Taper Roughness (Ground, Ridged), Taper Diameter (9/10, 12/14), and Stem Material (CoCrMo, Ti-6Al-4V). The heads were CoCrMo coupled with taper coupons (DePuy Synthes, Warsaw, IN). Test components were assembled wet and seated axially with 100 or 4000N assembly force. The assemblies were immersed in PBS and potentiostatically held at −50mV vs. Ag/AgCl. Incremental cyclic loads were applied vertically to the head at 3Hz until a 4000N maximum load was reached (See Fig. 1). Fretting currents at 4000 N cyclic load were used for comparisons while other parameters, including onset load, subsidence, micromotion and pull off load were also captured. Statistical analysis was performed using Pareto charts and Student's T-tests for single factor comparisons (P < 0.05 was statistically significant).Introduction
Methods
