A COMPUTATIONAL INVESTIGATION OF THE NONLINEAR BEHAVIOR OF HUMAN TRABECULAR BONE Harun H. Bayraktar (1) and Tony M.

Keaveny (2, 3, 4)
(1) ABAQUS, Inc. (2) Orthopaedic Biomechanics Laboratory, (3) Department of Mechanical Engineering, (4) Department of Bioengineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA Introduction Micro-finite element models (FE) are used extensively to study the mechanical properties of trabecular bone, both at the tissue and apparent levels. While only material nonlinearities have been included in FE models to predict apparent-level yield behavior of high-density trabecular bone, such as bovine tibial [4] and human femoral [1], it is believed that geometric nonlinearities play an important role in the mechanical behavior of low-density trabecular bone [3]. Recently, the importance of geometric and material nonlinearities in FE analysis has been studied for a single trabecula and a small volume of rat bone [6]. The goal of this study was to investigate the role of the tissue material constitution and geometric nonlinearities in low-density human trabecular bone failure behavior, for which no data exists. Methods One human vertebral trabecular bone specimen with 9% volume fraction was imaged using micro-computed tomography (CT 20, Scanco Medical AG, Bassersdorf, Switzerland) at 22 m resolution. A 5 mm cubic region was used to create a model with 131,322 elements of size 44 m (Fig. 1). Tissue material was modeled using two constitutive models: 1) cast iron plasticity, and 2) Mises plasticity. Cast iron plasticity provides elastic-plastic behavior with different yield strengths and hardening in tension and compression. In the Mises plasticity model the tensile and compressive behaviors are identical. In both material models a tissue elastic modulus of 13.4 GPa was used with a Poissons ratio of 0.3 [5]. For the cast iron plasticity model tissue yield stresses were 55.2 MPa in tension and 110.6MPa in compression, based on the yield strains reported for human femoral trabecular tissue [1]. For the Mises plasticity model, an average yield stress of 82.9 MPa was used. In both models, a hardening slope equal to 5% of the elastic modulus was used. For each material model, displacement boundary conditions of 2% apparent strain in tension and compression were applied in the superior-inferior direction. Also, each model was run with and without the effects of geometrically nonlinear deformations. In total, eight nonlinear analyses were performed and 0.2% offset yield strains were calculated. All analyses were performed using ABAQUS FEA software (v6.4-1, ABAQUS Inc., Pawtucket, RI) on an IBM Power4 computer, using 2 CPUs and 4.1 GB of memory. The cast iron plasticity material constitution results in an unsymmetric stiffness matrix and required 14.8 hrs CPU time (7.4 hrs wall-clock) per analysis. The models with Mises plasticity required less than 4 hrs CPU time. Results and Discussion Similar to reported experimental data [2], yield strains were higher in compression than tension for the cast iron plasticity material model. For this material model, although the tissue material was hardening, softening was observed at the apparent level when geometric nonlinearities were included (Fig. 2). Further the yield strains were similar to experimentally measured values [2]. In contrast, the Mises plasticity material model resulted in unrealistic apparent-level yield strains, such that when geometric nonlinearities were included, the yield strain was higher in tension than compression. In conclusion our results show that both the strength asymmetry of the trabecular tissue and geometric nonlinearities need to be incorporated in FE models to accurately model the failure behavior of low-density trabecular bone.

Figure 1: Rendering of the 5-mm cubic region of the human vertebral trabecular bone specimen. Loading was applied in the vertical direction (superior-inferior). Table 1: Yield strains for different modeling combinations
Material Model Cast Iron Plasticity Mises Plasticity
3.0 2.5 Apparent Stress (MPa) 2.0 1.5 1.0 0.5 0.0 0.0 Compression-NLGEOM Compression-Linear Tension-NLGEOM Tension-Linear 0.5 1.0 1.5 Apparent Strain (%) 2.0

Geometrical Modeling Nonlinear Linear Nonlinear Linear

Loading Mode Tension Compression 0.61 0.78 0.59 0.86 0.81 0.71 0.76 0.76

Figure 2: Stress-strain behavior for the four analyses in which the cast iron plasticity material constitution was used. The effects of geometric nonlinearities (NLGEOM) cause softening in compression and stiffening in tension. Markers show yield points. Acknowledgements: NIH-AR49570, NDRI. References
1. Bayraktar, H. H., et al., 2004, Journal of Biomechanics 37:27-35. 2. Morgan, E. F., and Keaveny, T. M., 2001, Journal of Biomechanics 34:569-577. 3. Mller, R., et al., 1998, Technology and Health Care 6:433-44. 4. Niebur, G. L., et al., 2000, Journal of Biomechanics 33:1575-1583. 5. Rho, J. Y., et al., 1997, Biomaterials 18:1325-30. 6. Stlken, J. S., and Kinney, J. H., 2003, Bone 33:494-504.

12th Annual Pre-ORS Symposium on Computational Methods in Orthopaedic Biomechanics, March 6, 2004, University of California, San Francisco