Articular cartilage (AC) is the weight-bearing tissue in diarthroses. It lacks the capacity for self-healing once there are injuries or diseases due to its avascularity. With the development of tissue engineering, repairing cartilage defects through transplantation of engineered cartilage that closely matches properties of native cartilage has become a new option for curing cartilage diseases. The main hurdle for clinical application of engineered cartilage is how to develop functional cartilage constructs for mass production in a credible way. Recently, impressive hyaline cartilage that may have the potential to provide capabilities for treating large cartilage lesions in the future has been produced in laboratories. The key to functional cartilage construction in vitro is to identify appropriate mechanical stimuli. First, they should ensure the function of metabolism because mechanical stimuli play the role of blood vessels in the metabolism of AC, for example, acquiring nutrition and removing wastes. Second, they should mimic the movement of synovial joints and produce phenotypically correct tissues to achieve the adaptive development between the micro- and macrostructure and function. In this article, we divide mechanical stimuli into three types according to forces transmitted by different media in bioreactors, namely forces transmitted through the liquid medium, solid medium, or other media, then we review and summarize the research status of bioreactors for cartilage tissue engineering (CTE), mainly focusing on the effects of diverse mechanical stimuli on engineered cartilage. Based on current researches, there are several motion patterns in knee joints; but compression, tension, shear, fluid shear, or hydrostatic pressure each only partially reflects the mechanical condition in vivo. In this study, we propose that rolling-sliding-compression load consists of various stimuli that will represent better mechanical environment in CTE. In addition, engineers often ignore the importance of biochemical factors to the growth and development of engineered cartilage. In our point of view, only by fully considering synergistic effects of mechanical and biochemical factors can we find appropriate culture conditions for functional cartilage constructs. Once again, rolling-sliding-compression load under appropriate biochemical conditions may be conductive to realize the adaptive development between the structure and function of engineered cartilage in vitro.

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Knee joint is the hub of human lower limb movement and it is also an important weight-bearing joint, which has the characteristics of load-bearing and heavy physical activities. So the knee joint becomes the predilection site of clinical disease. Once people have the cartilage lesions, their daily life will be affected seriously. The simulation of the knee joint lesions could provide help for clinical knee-joint treatment. Based on the complete model of knee joint, this paper use the finite element method to analyze the biomechanical characteristics of the defective knee joint. The results of simulation show that the stress of cartilages when standing on single leg is approximately doubled than that of standing on two legs. When standing on single leg, the 8-mm diameter osteochondral defect in femur cartilage can generate maximal changes in von-mises stress (by 36.74%), while the von-mises stress on tibia cartilage with 8-mm defect increase by 87%. The stress distribution of cartilages is almost the same, there is no obvious stress concentration when in defect. Increasing the defective diameter, femoral cartilage, meniscus and tibial all present an increasing trend towards stress. When increasing the applied load, the stress of the femoral cartilage, the meniscus and the tibial cartilage all increased.

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