Medical devices such as stents, catheters, and heart valves need to be resistant to corrosion to avoid adverse effects after deployment in the human body. Optimization of the medical device corrosion resistance is therefore critical. Furthermore, supporting data that a medical device is sufficiently resistant to corrosion is required by the FDA for approval of the device.
Auger Electron Spectroscopy enables both measurement of the surface oxide layer thickness and investigation of the oxide layer uniformity of electropolished medical devices. Auger can be used to provide representative data from the entire device or localized data to highlight differences between various areas on the surface(s) of interest. Figure 1 shows a typical Auger Depth Profile.