An investigation of the high cycle fatigue behavior of bovine trabecular bone

Fractures can be caused by fatigue loading due to prolonged exercise and age-related fragility. Fatigue loading causes microdamage in bone that leads to both a loss of stiffness and strength. Some engineering materials, such as steels, have a fatigue limit, which is represented by a stress plateau in the stress-life (S-N) curve. When loaded to levels below the stress plateau, these materials have an infinite fatigue life. Other materials, such as aluminum, do not exhibit a fatigue limit. For these materials, the endurance limit is defined as the stress amplitude corresponding to a somewhat arbitrary large number of cycles of fatigue (e.g. various texts suggest 10⁶ to 10⁸ cycles ). In previous work on compressive fatigue of bovine trabecular bone, it was hypothesized that there was a fatigue limit at a normalized stress, [Delta] [rho]/E₀, of approximately 0.0035. This study tested this hypothesis by fatigue testing bovine trabecular bone loaded to one of four normalized stresses ranging from 0.0015 to 0.0035. Failure was defined as a 10% loss in the secant modulus of the specimen. The data show that the rate of decrease of modulus reduction per cycle increased with increasing normalized stress. A fatigue limit in bovine trabecular bone was not found. While a threshold below which the fatigue life is infinite was not found, an endurance limit corresponding to 10⁶ cycles to failure was found at a normalized stress of about 0.00137. The study also showed that normalized secant modulus decreased with normalized number of cycles in the same manner for all normalized stresses.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2004

Author dc:creator

• Hastings, Abel Z., 1973-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Lorna J. Gibson.

• Materials Science and Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/30123

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/30123