Improved wear and corrosion resistance of biomedical TiZrNbTaMo medium-entropy alloy by thermal oxidation treatment

Thermal oxidation treatment was carried out on novel TiZrNbTaMo biomedical Medium-entropy alloy (bio-MEAs) at 400∼600 °C for 2 h in air. The extracted results demonstrated that the oxide layer was mainly composed of oxides of Zr and Ti, in which the content of ZrO2 and TiO2 with high hardness increased with the increase of oxidation temperature, leading to enhanced wear resistance (wear rate reduced from ∼10−4 to ∼10−5 mm3/N⋅m). Likewise, the oxide layer also improves the corrosion resistance of the alloys. The results showed that thermal oxidation can be used as an effective surface treatment method to broaden the application prospects of bio-MEAs.