Total Elbow Implant - Computer Assisted Design and Simulation

Abstract

The elbow total implant is in appearance a simple orthopedic device, with few components and no complex mechanisms. In spite of the reported successful surgical interventions, there are still many medical reports which show that a certain percentage of the implants fails.In our work we conceptually approach a computer assisted design of a Coonrad-Morrey like total elbow implant and simulate the mechanical behavior by finite element analysis, for three different loads (10 N, 50 N, and 100 N). Materials used for simulation were Ti, TiNi and Ti6Al4V for the metallic components, and UHMWPE for bushing polymeric components. Through our results we confirmed the practical observations, namely that the hinge mechanism is an important region where the failures initiates from, as the highest stress is concentrated on the polymeric components.