Elastohydrodynamic lubrication analysis of polymer‐on‐polymer artificial hip joint of CF/PEEK composite

Abstract

At present, the main frictional components of artificial hip joint (AHJ) are mainly the combinations of hard materials (metal, ceramic) and soft materials (polymer), such as, metal‐on‐metal (MoM), ceramic‐on‐ceramic (CoC), metal‐on‐polymer (MoP), and ceramic‐on‐polymer (CoP). As a new type of AHJ, the polymer‐on‐polymer (PoP) combination has gradually begun to be explored and studied. In this paper, PoP AHJ of CF/PEEK composite are studied, and elastohydrodynamic lubrication analysis based on the solution of the Reynolds equation is performed, and the results are compared with the MoM and MoP AHJs. The comparison shows that under the same steady‐state condition, the PoP AHJ has better lubrication performance. The influence of the key structural parameters of the CF/PEEK PoP AHJ is also analyzed in this paper, and the results show that the femoral head size and radial clearance have great influence on the thickness and pressure distribution of the lubricating film. The research results in this paper further confirm the application potential of the PoP AHJ, and are helpful to its practical application and structural design.

Non‐spherical shape optimization of artificial hip joint based on elastohydrodynamic lubrication analysis

“…The specific solution strategy can refer to the authors' previous work. 33 The accuracy of the EHL analysis is also crucial for the shape optimization of the AHJ, and it is affected by the mesh density of the model. According to the numerical tests, when the mesh density is higher than 100 Â 100, the influence on the thickness distribution of the lubricating film is relatively small, and the change of the lubricating film thickness tends to be stable.…”

“…The authors recently proposed a CF/PEEK polymeron-polymer AHJ model and analyzed its EHL performance, and the results showed that it had better lubrication performance than the traditional metal-onpolymer or metal-on-metal AHJ. 33 On this basis, combined with EHL analysis and the simulated annealing (SA) method, a shape optimization strategy for the femoral head of the CF/PEEK AHJ is proposed in this work, so as to obtain better lubrication performance and provide theoretical support for the novel design of the AHJ.…”