Growth and reabsorption in biological tissues
Joan O'Connor1; Lavinia Alves Borges1; Fernando Pereira Duda1; Antonio Guilherme da Cruz1
1 Programa de Engenharia Mecanica/COPPE, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
doi:10.20906/CPS/CILAMCE2015-0427
Resumo
The development of computational tools to predict the long-term behavior of prosthetic devices in orthopedics may contribute to improve the quality of life of the elderly population, and has a tremendous importance since the proportion of this population is increasing. In this work, we investigate bone density growth for a healthy femur and a femur with prosthesis submitted to loads. We consider a growth and remodeling theories for biological materials and its treatment using continuum mechanics. Accordingly, kinematics, balance laws, constitutive equations, and governing equations resulting from the coupling of mass and momentum balances are presented. The biomechanical coupled problem obtained is approximated by a finite-element model and implemented using COMSOL Multiphysics. We present simulation examples for a healthy femur and a femur with prosthesis. For the first example, density growth is not consider, and daily activities load cases were take into account in order to locate possible growth or reabsorption zones. For the second example, density growth is simulated considering bone as homogeneous tissue. Numerical results show that the proposed approach has a great capability of predicting density profiles due to different types of loads and to locate bone growth or reabsorption zones for the situations of intact and prosthetic femur studied in this work.
Palavras-chave: Bone tissue; density growth; continuum mechanics; finite elements