Bone as a composite material: The role of osteons as barriers to crack growth in compact bone

Nanoscale Examination of Microdamage in Sheep Cortical Bone Using Synchrotron Radiation Transmission X-Ray Microscopy

“…Studies in cortical bone demonstrated that damage will arrest at or move along cement lines or lamellae before moving through osteons [32]–[34]. Damage in the current study occurred in structures around and along lamella in the bone tissue, consistent with regions in which damage is typically observed at the microscale [35].…”

Distribution of microcrack lengths in bone in vivo and in vitro

“…Given sufficient time and/or stress, these cracks may continue to elongate, but our previous work [23,24] and that of others [25] has shown that 80-90% of all cracks become dormant at an early stage. Thus we reasoned that an approximate simulation of the distribution of microcrack lengths, at least for the great majority of cracks, might be obtained simply by measuring the distance between adjacent cement lines.…”

Continuum damage interactions between tension and compression in osteonal bone

“…Their thickness is one to two orders of magnitude smaller than their length. Microcracks are associated and guided by micro-structural and ultra-structural features of bone (Rho et al, 1998;Jepsen et al, 1999;O'Brien et al, 2005O'Brien et al, , 2007. They appear at highly mineralised zones in bone tissue, between interstitial lamellae, along osteonal cement lines, at the boundaries of trabecular packages, at resorption cavities in trabecular bone, and, in case of sub-lamellar microcracking, along the canaliculi in cortical bone (Zioupos and Currey, 1994;Jepsen et al, 1999;O'Brien et al, 2005O'Brien et al, , 2007Vashishth, 2007;Peterlik et al, 2006;Slyfield et al, 2012;Ebacher et al, 2012).…”