Calculation of Cancellous Bone Elastic Properties with the Polarization-based FFT Iterative Scheme

LUCAS COLABELLA; ARIEL IBARRA PINO; JOSEFINA BALLARRE; ADRIÁN CISILINO

International Journal for Numerical Methods in Biomedical Engineering

Wiley

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2017 vol. 33

2040-7947

The FFT based method, originally introduced by Moulinec and Suquet in 1994 has gained popularity for computing homogenized properties of composites. In this work, the method is used for the computational homogenization of the elastic properties of cancellous bone. To the authors? knowledge, this is the first study where the FFT scheme is applied to bone mechanics. The performance of the method is analyzed for artificial and natural bone samples of two species: bovine femoral heads and implanted femurs of Hokkaido rats. Model geometries are constructed using data from X-ray tomographies and the bone tissue elastic properties are measured using micro and nanoindentation tests. Computed results are in excellent agreement with those available in the literature. The study shows the suitability of the method to accurately estimate the fully anisotropic elastic response of cancellous bone. There are provided guidelines for the construction of the models and the setting of the algorithm.