Ruggiero Alessandro, D'Amato Roberto, Affatato Saverio
Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Salerno, Via Giovanni Paolo II, nr. 132, 84084 Fisciano, Italy.
Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería y Diseño Industrial, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Roda de Valencia, 3, 28012 Madrid, Spain.
Materials (Basel). 2019 Jul 23;12(14):2332. doi: 10.3390/ma12142332.
In biomechanics and orthopedics, finite element modelling allows simulating complex problems, and in the last few years, it has been widely used in many applications, also in the field of biomechanics and biotribology. As is known, one crucial point of FEM (finite element model) is the discretization of the physical domain, and this procedure is called meshing. A well-designed mesh is necessary in order to achieve accurate results with an acceptable computational effort. The aim of this work is to test a finite element model to simulate the dry frictionless contact conditions of a hip joint prosthesis (a femoral head against an acetabular cup) in a soft bearing configuration by comparing the performances of 12 common meshing strategies. In the simulations, total deformation of the internal surface of the cup, contact pressure, and the equivalent von Mises stress are evaluated by using loads and kinematic conditions during a typical gait, obtained from a previous work using a musculoskeletal multibody model. Moreover, accounting for appropriate mesh quality metrics, the results are discussed, underlining the best choice we identified after the large amount of numerical simulations performed.
在生物力学和矫形外科学领域，有限元建模能够模拟复杂问题，并且在过去几年中，它已在许多应用中广泛使用，在生物力学和生物摩擦学领域也不例外。众所周知，有限元模型（FEM）的一个关键点是物理域的离散化，这个过程称为网格划分。为了在可接受的计算量下获得准确结果，精心设计的网格是必要的。这项工作的目的是通过比较12种常见网格划分策略的性能，测试一个有限元模型，以模拟软轴承配置下髋关节假体（股骨头与髋臼杯）的干摩擦无接触条件。在模拟中，利用典型步态期间的载荷和运动学条件，通过使用肌肉骨骼多体模型的先前工作获得，来评估髋臼杯内表面的总变形、接触压力和等效应力。此外，考虑到适当的网格质量指标，对结果进行了讨论，强调了在进行大量数值模拟后我们确定的最佳选择。
