Samples of skin, tendons, muscles, and knitwear composed of NiTi wire are studied by uniaxial cyclic tension and stretching to rupture. The metal knitted mesh behaves similar to a superelastic material when stretched, similar to soft biological tissues. The superelasticity effect was found in NiTi wire, but not in the mesh composed of it. A softening effect similar to biological tissues is observed during the cyclic stretching of the mesh. The mechanical behavior of the NiTi mesh is similar to the biomechanical behavior of biological tissues. The discovered superelastic effects allow developing criteria for the selection and evaluation of mesh materials composed of titanium nickelide for soft tissue reconstructive surgery.
This paper studied the features of the martensitic transformations and mechanical properties of 40, 60, and 90 µm thick NiTi wires with nanocrystalline B2 structures. It was established that the wires were composites and consisted of a TiNi matrix and a TiO2 + TiNi3 surface layer. Structural methods showed that the wire matrix was formed by grains of up to 20 nm in size. The method of measuring the electrical resistivity during cooling and heating revealed a two-stage nature of the martensitic transformation. Cyclic loading–unloading demonstrated that all the samples exhibited superelasticity effects and completely restored their shape when unloaded from a 4–8% relative strain at room temperature. An increase in mechanical characteristics with respect to the wire thickness was experimentally established. This was due to the change in the composition of the TiNi matrix during drawing.
Hydroxyapatite coatings were deposited for 1, 2, and 3 h on NiTi substrates using plasma-assisted radio frequency sputtering. The matrix consisted of NiTi B2 and NiTi B19’ phases and Ti2Ni, Ni3Ti, and Ni4Ti3 intermetallic compounds. The surface coating was monoclinic hydroxyapatite. Increasing the deposition time to 3 h made it possible to form a dense hydroxyapatite layer without visible defects. The phase contrast maps showed that the coating consisted of round grains of different fractions, with the smallest grains in the sample deposited for 3 h. The wettability tests showed that the coating deposited for 3 h had the highest surface energy, reflected in the proliferation density of the MCF-7 cell line.