Wear Characteristics of Conventional and Squeeze-Film Artificial Hip Joints

Abstract

This paper investigates the wear characteristics of a novel squeeze-film hip implant design. Key features of the design are elastic elements attached to the cup which provide a mechanical means for ball separation during the swing phase of the gait loading cycle. An Archard-based wear formulation was implemented utilizing the ansys finite element analysis program which relates contact pressure and sliding distance to linear wear depth. It is found that low-modulus elastic elements with bonded high-modulus metal coatings offer significant predicted improvement in linear and volumetric wear rates when compared with conventional implant geometries for gait cycle loading and kinematic conditions found in practice.