Mechanical Properties and Structural Behavior of Bone at Nano Scale with Cohesive Element

Document Type : Research Article

Authors

1 Faculty of Civil Engineering, Babol Noshirvani University of Technology, Babol, Iran

2 Professor of Biomechanics, University of Bern, Switzerland

Abstract

Bone is a biological tissue whose main components are different from the mechanical aspect. Some of the bone diseases are due to mutations in the bone structure at the nano scale, while their clinical symptoms appear at the macro scale. Therefore, the evaluation of bone at micro and nano scales is important. In the current study, the finite element modeling is performed to evaluate the mechanical properties and behavior of bone at the nano scale and the cohesive element is applied. After its verification, the stress distribution and elastic properties are compared with the analytical model. Limited studies are available on strain ratio and it is presented for different cohesive elements in the current study. The influence of mineral volume fraction and mechanical properties of collagen is investigated. The comparison between finite element models and the other ones demonstrate an excellent agreement. The collagen- hydroxyapatite interface with unknown mechanical properties is the most important parameter in the model and the thick water layer with Van der Waals interaction and viscous shear is determined as the most probable cohesive layer. The parametric studies indicate the significant effect of nonlinear collagen on the model. To decrease the calculation in models, the proposed unit cell with periodic boundary conditions could be employed.

Keywords

Main Subjects

References

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Amirkabir Journal of Mechanical Engineering
Volume 53, Issue 2
May 2021
Pages 745-776

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