Assessment of Ion Release for Ni-Cr Dental Alloy with Monolithic and Multilayer Coatings in Different pH Level

Abstract

Abstract We successfully formed nanostructured TiN, CrN, and multilayered TiN/CrN coatings on the Ni-Cr alloy using a cathodic arc evaporation (CAE) technique. Coatings were exposed to artificial saliva solutions with two pH of 5 and 8 to investigate their ion release. We measured the surface roughness of produced coatings using atomic force microscope (AFM). CrN coatings exhibited smoother surface, while TiN and TiN/CrN coatings showed surfaces with greater roughness. X-ray diffraction (XRD) and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) were used to investigate the microstructure of coated and uncoated Ni-Cr samples. We found that the greatest ion release was apparent for uncoated samples in artificial saliva solutions with two pH of 5 and 8. The least ion release was found for CrN coatings once pH was 8 indicating that the coating performance was affected by pH variation and CrN coatings offered the strongest hindrance against ion release.