Recycling of different kind of materials becomes a priority target in many manufacturing industries. This approach has reached fish processing and canning factories in all over the world. Special treatment can be carried out with the seafood shells based on their calcium carbonate content. Moreover, it is well known that the backbone is enriched in different calcium phosphate phases.
The waste from these parts of fish and sea food can constitute a source of precursor material for different applications in biomedical field such as bioceramic coatings to improve the osteointegration of metallic implants.
The aim of this research work is to explore the capabilities of this material in order to produce biocompatible coatings by laser surface cladding technique. A Nd:YAG laser having an average power of 500 W was used for these experiments.
The morphology and chemical composition of the precursor material was analyzed and the powder blowing technique was employed to convey the particles to the laser-substrate interaction zone. Preliminary experiments were designed keeping mean laser power, powder mass flow and feed rate as processing parameters to identify the suitable combination of them to get coatings with strong adhesion and free of defects.
The coatings were physic-chemically characterized by SEM and EDX to recognize the morphology and the evolution in-depth of the elements, XRD to identify the phases present in the coatings.