On the Effect of Friction on Tibiofemoral Joint Kinematics

Abstract

The effect of friction on nonlinear dynamics and vibration of total knee arthroplasties is yet to be investigated and understood. This research work aims at studying the influence of friction on nonlinear dynamics, friction-induced vibration, and damage of tibiofemoral joints. For this purpose, a spatial dynamic knee model is developed using an asymmetric nonlinear elastic model accounting for knee joint ligaments and a penalty contact model to compute normal contact stresses in the joint while contact detection is treated such that the associated computational time is reduced. Several friction models are considered and embedded in the dynamic model to estimate tangential friction forces in the knee joint. External loads and moments, due to the presence of all soft tissues, e.g., muscles and hip-joint reaction forces, applied to the femoral bone are determined using a musculoskeletal approach. In the post-processing stage, damage, i.e., wear and creep, are estimated using three wear models and an empirical creep formulation, respectively. In addition, a FFT analysis is performed to evaluate likely friction-induced vibration of tibiofemoral joints. Mesh density analysis is performed and the methodology is assessed against outcomes available in the literature. It can be concluded that friction influences not only the tribology, but also dynamics of the knee joint, and friction-induced vibration is likely to take place when the friction coefficient increases.

Personalized compression therapeutic textiles: digital design, development, and biomechanical evaluation

“…To simulate the sliding process, the upper and bottom leg surfaces were fixed to facilitate the freedom of CS sliding. In addition, the interfacial contact condition was applied to the frictional non-linear contact with a coefficient of 0.2 ( Askari and Andersen, 2021 ). The longitudinal displacements (S1: 34 cm; S2: 44 cm; and S3: 36 cm) of CTs were determined as the boundary conditions of a biomechanical system for pressure behavior visualization.…”

Subject-specific tribo-contact conditions in total knee replacements: a simulation framework across scales

“…Overall, the models were coupled sequentially, i.e., unidirectionally, and the results from biomechanical simulation were used as input for tribo-contact models. Thus, no direct interaction and feedback of the contact conditions (friction) on the dynamics is considered (Askari and Andersen 2021b ). In the future, this might be overcome by directly coupling both modeling approaches, which, however, would potentially result in drastically increased computational time as well as poor convergence.…”

“…In silico modeling of TKRs generally covers the domains of biomechanical musculoskeletal simulation (Askari and Andersen 2021a , 2021b ) as well as tribo-contact simulation to allow for a stringent representation of the loads during a gait cycle from the macro to the microscale (Affatato and Ruggiero 2020 ). Musculoskeletal simulations utilize multibody biomechanical human models and inverse kinematic and dynamic simulation approaches in order to compute joint kinematics, joint torques, muscle activations, muscle forces, or joint reaction forces from experimental motion data (Damsgaard et al 2006 ).…”

“…Moissenet et al ( 2017 ) and recently Tomasi et al ( 2022 ) systematically reviewed the state-of-the-art for estimating hip and knee joint loads through musculoskeletal modeling. Thereby, several studies, such as those by Askari and Andersen ( 2021a ; b ) or Affatato and Ruggiero ( 2019 ), Ruggiero and Sicilia ( 2020a , 2021 ; b ), Ruggiero et al ( 2018 , 2020b ), demonstrate that musculoskeletal simulations of artificial joints can directly be coupled to or generate input data for contact models.…”