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. 2016 Mar 21;49(5):765-772.
doi: 10.1016/j.jbiomech.2016.02.019. Epub 2016 Feb 15.

Connection between elastic and electrical properties of cortical bone

X Gao  1 , I Sevostianov  2
Affiliations

Connection between elastic and electrical properties of cortical bone

X Gao et al. J Biomech. .

Abstract

The paper focuses on the connection between elastic and electrical properties of cortical bone. Both these properties are governed by microstructure that consists of several pore systems filled with mechanically soft and electrically conductive tissue. Microstructural changes induced by aging, various diseases, microgravity conditions etc. lead to variation in both properties. The paper address the problem of evaluation of the changes in mechanical performance (decrease in Young׳s moduli) via monitoring electrical conductivity. The theoretical results are verified experimentally.

Keywords: Cortical bone; Cross-property connections; Elastic stiffness; Electrical conductivity.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of interests statement

The authors of this manuscript have no conflict of interest with the presented work.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Microstructure of cortical bone used in the present model: it is formed by osteons surrounding Haversian canals that contain blood and lymph vessels and nerves. Volkman’s canals and canaliculi are randomly oriented in the planes orthogonal to the Haversian canals. The lamellae in osteons contain osteocytes located in oblate spheroidal pores (lacunae)
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Dependence on the aspect ratio of inhomogeneity of (a) Components of Hill’s tensor; (b) components of the compliance contribution tensor (the elastic stiffnesses of the matrix material are given in Table 1); (c) components of the compliance contribution tensor of the pore embedded in the isotropic material constituting the best fit for transversely-isotropic cortical bone; (d) parameters A1 and A2 entering expression for the effective electrical conductivity.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Accuracy of the approximate representation of the pore compliance tensor H as a function of pore aspect ratio for transversely isotropic material given in Table 1 (solid line) and its best fit isotropic approximation (dashed line).
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
(a) Cortical bone specimens;(b) storage of polished specimens (c) schematic diagram of rectangular parallelograms specimen;(d) TCS SP5 II Broadband confocal microscope to obtain morphology of cortical bone; (e) HP 4338B milliohmmeter to measure electrical resistance of wet cortical bone (f) three-point bending testing to measure Young’s modulus of wet cortical bone.
Figure 5.
Figure 5.
(a) Dependence of the Young’s modulus E3 of the cortical bone on the porosity; (b) Dependence of the longitudinal conductivity k33 on the porosity; (c) Young’s modulus E3 as function of the longitudinal conductivity k33 of the cortical bone.
Figure 6.
Figure 6.
Comparison of the analytically derived cross-property connection (5.15) with experimental data.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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