Knee implants & femoral components

THE COMPANY

The client is a multinational medical company whose activity revolves around medical device development and manufacturing with strong presence in orthopedic implant manufacturing sector. This organization focuses on creating innovative solutions in orthopedics, to improve hospital outcomes and patients’ conditions. Its human team is looking forward enhancing the company’s position in trauma, providing new opportunities to innovate and improve patients’ quality of life by minimizing rejection of the implant or premature failure and reaching more patients.

THE GOAL

The company was looking to increase the production efficiency and quality of casting cobalt-chrome (CoCr) femoral components, which represented 80% of the customer’s manufacturing. The customer needed to polish knee implants that had been previously preprocessed by manual polishing with belts, ceramic, plastic and nutshell abrasive polishing and a final manual buffing. Concerning the polishing target, it consisted in mirror surface finishing pieces and a significant roughness reduction and a Ra goal of 0.05 micrometers.

THE SOLUTION

GPAINNOVA successfully achieved the required technical surface finishing specifications, minimizing both process time and cost factors. The outcome involved high-gloss polishing, which effectively reduces friction, prevents premature failure and corrosion. This accomplishment was combined with maintaining stringent tolerances and improving corrosion resistance, all without necessitating additional post-processing steps. This approach streamlined the process significantly by eliminating the need for previous steps such as nutshell and manual buffing.

The time and manufacturing cost savings were also substantial. With a processing time of 64 minutes, DLyte was able to treat a batch of 24 pieces per work cycle.