Hydroxyapatite/palmitic acid superhydrophobic composite coating on AZ31 magnesium alloy with both corrosion resistance and bacterial inhibition

Abstract

The coating-modified magnesium (Mg) alloys exhibit controllable corrosion resistance, but the insufficient antibacterial performance limits their clinical applications as degradable implants. Superhydrophobic coatings show excellent performance in terms of both corrosion resistance and inhibition of bacterial adhesion and growth. In this work, a hydroxyapatite (HA)/palmitic acid (PA) superhydrophobic composite coating was fabricated on the Mg alloy by the hydrothermal technique and immersion treatment. The HA/PA composite coating showed superhydrophobicity with a contact angle of 153° and a sliding angle of 2°. The coated Mg alloy exhibited excellent corrosion resistance in the simulated body fluid, with high polarization resistance (77.10 kΩ·cm²) and low corrosion current density ((0.491 ± 0.015) μA·cm⁻²). Meanwhile, the antibacterial efficiency of the composite coating was over 98% against E. coli and S. aureus in different periods. The results indicate that the construction of such superhydrophobic composite coating (HA/PA) on the Mg alloy can greatly improve the corrosion resistance of Mg alloy implants within the human body and avoid bacterial infection during the initial stages of implantation.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

superhydrophobic coating / hydroxyapatite / corrosion resistance / antibacterial

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Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose, no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article, no affiliations with or involvement in any organization or entity with any financial interest or non-financial interest in the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript, and no financial or proprietary interests in any material discussed in this article.

Acknowledgements

The authors express their sincere gratitude to the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 52271246 and 82272533) and the Shanghai Sailing Program (Grant No. 21YF1458200) for providing financial support.

Online appendix

Electronic supplementary material (ESM) can be found in the online version at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11706-024-0678-8 and https://journal.hep.com.cn/foms/EN/10.1007/s11706-024-0678-8 that includes Figs. S1 and S2.

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