Corrosion Modeling of Magnesium and Its Alloys for Biomedical Applications: Review

Biodegradable metals have been under significant research as promising alternatives to the currently in-use nonbiodegradable materials in the field of supportive medical implants. In this scope, magnesium and its alloys were widely investigated due to their superior biocompatibility over other metals. Most of the research effort in the literature has been focused on assuring the biocompatibility, improving mechanical properties, and tailoring the corrosion rate of magnesium-based implants. Furthermore, considerable research was done to develop numerical models towards an inexpensive and fast designing tools capable of simulating the degradation/corrosion behavior of magnesium-based implants. Due to the complexity of the degradation process and the various factors that can be involved, several hypotheses were introduced to provide a realistic simulation of the corrosion behavior in vitro and in vivo. A review of the current literature hypothesis and different modeling constitutive equations for modeling the corrosion of magnesium alloys along with a summary of the supplementary experimental methods is provided in this paper.