Elasto-Hydrodynamic Analysis of Human Artificial Hip Joint Prostheses

Abstract

Hip joint is one of the most important human joints that should be fully understood. The present research work aims at improving the tribological performance of the human artificial hip joint prostheses to help in producing reliable ones using design charts. An elasto-hydrodynamic model of the hip joint is proposed and numerical solution of the governing equations using finite difference technique is used to predict the elasto-hydrodynamic behavior of such joint. Parametric study has been conducted and results have shown that, thicker cup gives better tribological performance and the increase in the femoral head radius results in decreasing the non-dimensional maximum pressure and decreasing the non-dimensional minimum film thickness. Also, increasing the angular velocity doesn’t affect the tribological behavior considerably.