Background: The risk of femoral stem fracture after total hip replacement is low and can often be associated with a specific implant system or other factors that may reduce the fatigue strength. Additionally, damage to a metal component during revision surgery by an electrocautery device may further affect the fatigue behavior. Methods: Two clinical cases of stem failure after revision of fractured ceramic components are presented; the retrieved components were analyzed for the cause of failure. In vitro cyclic load-to-failure testing of titanium alloy femoral stems after electrocautery application at 2 different locations (at the base and about midway on the femoral neck) was performed using a stepwise increase in load until implant fracture occurred. In addition, a detailed characterization of the local material structure around the electrocautery marks was performed. Results: Superficial discoloration and melting marks were found on the retrieved components, including at the location of crack initiation in the anterolateral region, which may have reduced the fatigue strength of the material. In addition, elemental analysis indicated material transfer from the electrocautery tip. Damage to the surface by the electrocautery device significantly reduced the in vitro load to failure by up to 47% compared with that of undamaged femoral neck specimens. Material analysis revealed a relevant modification in microstructure, with an extension of approximately 2.7 mm and a depth of 550 µm, which could be divided in 3 structural zones. Conclusions: Intraoperative electrocautery device contact with the implant during surgical revision of a total hip replacement cannot always be avoided. However, on the basis of our findings, the risk of implant failure is increased due to a change in microstructure and a potential reduction of the implant’s fatigue strength. Surgeons and manufacturers of electrocautery devices should be aware of this concern. Clinical Relevance: During revision surgery, contact between an electrocautery device and the femoral component should be avoided to reduce the chance of subsequent femoral neck fracture.
The resulting shapes in production processes of metal components are strongly influenced by deformation induced residual stresses. Dual-phase steels are commonly used for industrial application of, e.g., forged or deep-drawn structural parts. This is due to their ability to handle high plastic deformations, while retaining desired stiffness for the products. In order to influence the resulting shape as well as component characteristics positively it is important to predict the distribution of phase-specific residual stresses which occur on the microscale of the material. In this contribution a comparative study is presented, where two approaches for the numerical simulation of residual stresses are applied. On the one hand a numerically efficient mean field theory is used to estimate on the grain level the total strain, the plastic strains and the eigenstrains based on macroscopic stress, strain and stiffness data. An alternative ansatz relies on a Taylor approximation for the grain level strains. Both approaches are applied to the corrosion-resistant duplex steel X2CrNiMoN22-5-3 (1.4462), which consists of a ferritic and an austenitic phase with the same volume fraction. Mean field and Taylor approximation strategies are implemented for usage in three dimensional solid finite element analysis and a geometrically exact Euler–Bernoulli beam for the simulation of a four-point-bending test. The predicted residual stresses are compared to experimental data from bending experiments for the phase-specific residual stresses/strains which have been determined by neutron diffraction over the bending height of the specimen.
In the present work, neutronographic in situ diffraction stress analyses during uniaxial loading and subsequent unloading were carried out on the two duplex stainless steels X2CrNiMoN22-5-3 and X3CrNiMoN27-5-2 with nominal phase fractions for ferrite:austenite of 50:50% and 70:30%, respectively. In addition to the different phase fractions, the two steels also differed in their phase-specific crystallographic texture. The load-partitioning behaviour and the phase-specific micro (residual) stress evolution for total strains up to about 9% were investigated. The results indicated that for both materials under load, the phase-specific stress in the ferrite phase was significantly higher than in the austenite phase, while no texture development through the plastic deformation could be observed.
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