Finite Element Analysis of Patient-Specific Femur Bone for Synthetic Biomaterials

Abstract

Femoral fracture is one of the most common injuries that an orthopaedic surgeon has to treat. Reverse engineering (RE) and additive manufacturing (AM) can be employed to obtain patient-specific femur bone from CT scan data of a patient. The objective of this study is to perform finite element analysis (FEA) of different biomaterials to access their mechanical behaviour as a synthetic femur bone. CT scan data of femur bone is obtained in DICOM format which is then converted into the CAD model using DeVIDE software. Now the CAD model is loaded into CAE software to perform FEA of the femur bone for three biomaterials (Ti6Al4V, SS AISI 316 and R30075 Cobalt). Results of FEA reveals that under same loading conditions, minimum Von Mises stresses developed in Ti6Al4V. Ti6Al4V also shows the best strength to weight ratio among all materials, which makes it the most suitable material for synthetic femur bone.