Strontium-substituted hydroxyapatite coatings deposited via a co-deposition sputter technique

The bioactivity of hydroxyapatite (HA) coatings can be modified by the addition of different ions, such as silicon (Si), lithium (Li), magnesium (Mg), zinc (Zn) or strontium (Sr) into the HA lattice. Of the ions listed here, strontium substituted hydroxyapatite (SrHA) coatings have received a lot of interest recently as Sr has been shown to promote osteoblast proliferation and differentiation, and reduce osteoclast activity. In this study, SrHA coatings were deposited onto titanium substrates using radio frequency (RF) magnetron co-sputtering (and compared to those surfaces deposited from HA alone). FTIR, XPS, XRD, and SEM techniques were used to analyse the different coatings produced, whereby different combinations of pure HA and 13% Sr-substituted HA targets were investigated. The results highlight that Sr could be successfully incorporated into the HA lattice to form SrHA coatings. It was observed that as the number of SrHA sputtering targets in the study were increased (increasing Sr content), the deposition rate decreased. It was also shown that as the Sr content of the coatings increased, so did the degree of preferred 002 orientation of the coating (along with obvious changes in the surface morphology). This study has shown that RF magnetron sputtering (specifically co-sputtering), offers an appropriate methodology to control the surface properties of Sr-substituted HA, such as the crystallinity, stoichiometry, phase purity and surface morphology.