Low-temperature deposition of rutile film on biomaterials substrates and its ability to induce apatite deposition in vitro

Low-temperature deposition of crystalline titania films on intrinsically bioinert materials to induce the bioactivity is of practical interest, not only because it meets the demand of providing organic biomaterials with bioactivity, which cannot tolerate high-temperature thermal treatments, but also because it reserves abundant Ti–OH groups facilitating the apatite deposition. In this paper, rutile films with thickness varied from 0.1 μm to 1.7 μm were deposited on commercially available pure titanium substrates from 1.5 M titanium tetrachloride aqueous solution kept at 60 °C for 3–60 h. The rutile films grew to give a preferred (101) crystalline plane in the X-ray diffraction pattern. After soaking in a simulated body fluid of the Kokubo solution (SBF) for 2 days, the rutile films with thickness over 0.6 μm were covered with a layer of apatite. All the films with various thickness induced apatite deposition in SBF after soaking for 5 days. The bioinert polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) was also found to exhibit remarkable in vitro bioactivity as to induce apatite deposition from SBF within 2 days, after depositing the rutile film on the surface. This work is supported partly by the Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province under the project No. M503011.