GRINDING OF MEDICAL IMPLANTS IN COBALT-CHROMIUM ALLOY

Christophe Tournier (1) , Christophe Iabassene (1) , Anthony Guiot (1) , Yann Quinsat (1)

1 LURPA - Laboratoire Universitaire de Recherche en Production Automatisée

The manufacturing of medical implants such as knees or ankles prostheses require surface roughness that milling operations cannot achieve. Thus, polishing operations are mandatory but these operations are mainly carried out manually by skilled workers. As this process is expensive in terms of price and downtime of the parts, automatic finishing on machine tools is an alternate solution to improve quality and productivity. Thus, the aim of this paper is to study the performance of a grinding (or rough polishing) spherical flexible tool for obtaining cobalt-chromium prostheses on 5-axis machine tool. The influence of machining parameters on the machined surfaces quality is achieved using a design of experiments. A range of variation of this pseudo feed, i.e. the relationship between cutting speed and feedrate, is proposed to achieve the quality required by implant manufacturers.

Mots clés: Grinding; cobalt-chromium; surface roughness; medical implants

Domaines: Génie mécanique [physics.class-ph]; Génie mécanique [physics.class-ph]

Christophe Tournier, Christophe Iabassene, Anthony Guiot, Yann Quinsat. GRINDING OF MEDICAL IMPLANTS IN COBALT-CHROMIUM ALLOY. 1st International Conference on Design and PROcesses for MEdical Devices, May 2012, Brescia, Italy. pp.95-98. ⟨hal-00783925⟩