Abstract
Wettability at the surface of an implant material play a key role in its success as it modulate the protein adsorption and thereby influences cell attachment and tissue integration at the interface. Hence, surface engineering of implantable materials to enhance wettability to physiological fluid under in vivo conditions is an area of active research. In light of this, in the present work a laser based optical interference and direct melting techniques were used to develop synthetic micro textures on Ti-6Al-4V alloys and their effects on wettability were systematically studied. Improved wettability to simulated body fluid and distilled water was observed for the Ca-P coatings obtained by direct melting technique. This superior wettability was attributed to both the appropriate surface chemistry and three dimensional surface features obtained using this technique. To assert a better control on surface texture and wettability a three dimensional thermal model based on COMSOL’sTM multiphysics was employed to predict the features obtained by laser melting technique. The effect of physical texture and wetting on biocompatibility of laser processed Ca-P coating was evaluated in the preliminary efforts on culturing of mouse MC3T3-E1 osteoblast cells.