Some ceramic-on-ceramic hip implants have been shown to squeak in vivo. While many researchers have investigated the squeaking phenomenon, the root cause is still debated. The most widely accepted hypotheses postulate that squeaking occurs as a result of edge-loading, stripe-wear, vibrations that are amplified by the femoral stem, dryness, or a combination of the foregoing. In our custom test apparatus to asses wear related squeaking, we found that even when both implants are severely worn, squeaking only occurs under dry conditions as shown in the attached video.
Tag Archives: research
Publication: Statistical perturbation of material properties in Uintah
Swan, S. and R. Brannon (2009)
Illustration of stair-stepping typical of finite sampling from a Weibull distribution
Current simulations of material deformation are a balance between computational effort and accuracy of the simulation. To increase the accuracy of the simulated material response, the simulation becomes more computationally intensive with finer meshes and shorter timesteps, increasing the time and resource requirements needed to perform the simulation. One method for improving predictions of brittle failure while minimizing computational overhead is to implement statistical variability for the material properties being simulated. This method has low computational overhead and requires a relatively small increase in resource requirements while significantly increasing the precision of simulation results. Currently, most simulation frameworks inaccurately describe brittle and heterogeneous materials as uniform bodies of equal strength and consistency. This over-simplification underscores the need to implement statistical variability to help better predict material response and failure modes for materials that contain intermittent abnormalities such as changes in hardness, strength, and grain size throughout the specimen. Uintah, the computational framework developed by the University of Utah’s C-SAFE program, has a simplistic native Gaussian distribution function that was hard-coded into select material models. The goal of this research is to create an easily duplicable method for enabling dynamic global variability according to a Weibull distribution in constitutive models in Uintah and to implement said ability into the constitutive model Kayenta. The main application of Kayenta is to simulate geological response to penetration and perforation. For the purpose of simulating failure in brittle geological samples, the Weibull distribution produces realistic statistical scatter in constituent properties that correlates well to flaws and irregularities observed in laboratory tests.
Available online:
http://www.mech.utah.edu/~brannon/pubs/2009SWAN_spring2009UROPfinalReport.pdf
Research: Thermodynamic Consistency, and Strain-Based Failure
The Kayenta geological material model has been enhanced to span a broader range of pressures and loading rates. Temperature dependence of yield strength has been added along with nonlinear thermoelasticity that can accommodate pressure dependence of the shear modulus and entropy dependence of the bulk modulus in a thermodynamically consistent manner. Continue reading
Powder metal jet penetration into stressed rock
The Uintah computational framework (UCF) has been adopted for simulation of shaped charge jet penetration and subsequent damage to geological formations. The Kayenta geomechanics model, as well as a simplified model for shakedown simulations has been incorporated within the UCF and is undergoing extensive development to enhance it to account for fluid in pore space.
A generic penetration simulation using Uintah
The host code (Uintah) itself has been enhanced to accommodate material variability and scale effects. Simulations have been performed that import flash X-ray data for the velocity and geometry of a particulated metallic jet so that uncertainty about the jet can be reduced to develop predictive models for target response. Uintah’s analytical polar decomposition has been replaced with an iterative algorithm to dramatically improve accuracy under large deformations. Continue reading
Publication: On a viscoplastic model for rocks with mechanism-dependent characteristic times
A.F. Fossum and R.M. Brannon (2006)
This paper summarizes the results of a theoretical and experimental program at Sandia National Laboratories aimed at identifying and modeling key physical features of rocks and rock-like materials at the laboratory scale over a broad range of strain rates. The mathematical development of a constitutive model is discussed and model predictions versus experimental data are given for a suite of laboratory tests. Concurrent pore collapse and cracking at the microscale are seen as competitive micromechanisms that give rise to the well-known macroscale phenomenon of a transition from volumetric compaction to dilatation under quasistatic triaxial compression. For high-rate loading, this competition between pore collapse and microcracking also seems to account for recently identified differences in strain-rate sensitivity between uniaxial-strain ‘‘plate slap’’ data compared to uniaxial-stress Kolsky bar data. A description is given of how this work supports ongoing efforts to develop a predictive capability in simulating deformation and failure of natural geological materials, including those that contain structural features such as joints and other spatial heterogeneities.
Available online:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11440-006-0010-z
http://www.mech.utah.edu/~brannon/pubs/7-2006FossumBrannonMechanismDependentViscoplasticity.pdf
Verification Research: The method of manufactured solutions (MMS)
MMS stands for “Method of Manufactured Solutions,” which is a rather sleazy sounding name for what is actually a respected and rigorous method of verifying that a finite element (or other) code is correctly solving the governing equations.
A simple introduction to MMS may be found on page 11 of The ASME guide for verification and validation in solid mechanics. The basic idea is to analytically determine forcing functions that would lead to a specific, presumably nontrivial, solution (of your choice) for the dependent variable of a differential equation. Then you would verify a numerical solver for that differential equation by running it using your analytically determined forcing function. The difference between the code’s prediction and your selected manufactured solution provides a quantitative measure of error.
Publication: Conjugate stress and strain caveats /w distortion and deformation distinction
The publication, “Caveats concerning conjugate stress and strain measures (click to download)” contains an analytical solution for the stress in a fiber reinforced composite in the limit as the matrix material goes to zero stiffness. Because the solution is exact for arbitrarily large deformations, it is a great test case for verification of anisotropic elasticity codes, and it nicely illustrates several subtle concepts in large-deformation continuum mechanics.
Also see related viewgraphs entitled “The distinction between large distortion and large deformation.”
University of Utah CSM Group 