Metallic glass for bone surgery

Metallic glass - Metallic glass is a hot topic in the field of materials science. Only since the early 1990s, says Jörg Löffler, could metallic glasses be produced in larger dimensions and be used as engineering material in the form of 'bulk metallic glasses'. Since then laboratories have been searching intensively for applications for such glasses, which have several advantages over traditional metals. They are much more elastic than crystalline materials and demonstrate a strength that is two to three times higher. These properties would be valuable in bone implants, as metallic glass parts could carry out the same function as their traditional crystalline counterparts but be much smaller. However, metallic glasses also have some disadvantages: their plasticity is not as high as that of normal metals; and, depending on the composition of the alloy, individual components can often only be produced in thicknesses of a few millimetres to centimetres (otherwise they cannot be cooled quickly enough, and a crystal structure forms). For this reason metallic glasses are mostly used in filigree devices, for example in the field of sensory applications and microtechnology.