3D-Design, Fabrication and Metrological Characteristics for Knee Meniscus Replacement Prototype using Proposed Polymeric Material

Abstract

Due to the accidents of the motor vehicles and the osteoporosis, many people enface a lot of troubles and sometimes necessities for replacement of their knee joints. Practically, mechanical properties and surface characteristics of Total Knee Replacement (TKR) are very important parameters for improving the performance response in human. The meniscus is a small element and an essential part of the TKR. The knee meniscus has special feature allows the easy dynamic loading and motion of leg and foot with high accuracy and good balance. Therefore design and analysis of the geometrical shape for the meniscus replacement is worthy to be studied. In this paper, a proposed design using a computer software package has been presented. 3D simulation analyses of a variety of meniscus thickness and different materials under different loads are investigated. The compression stresses and surfaces deformations are determined numerically through the Finite Element Analysis (FEA) technique. A developed polymeric material reinforced by Carbon Nanotube particles (CNTs) is discussed. The thickness of meniscus for both the tibia-direction (Ht) and the femur-direction (Hf) has insignificant effect on the compression stresses and surface deformation. While, the developed material of 50 wt.% UHMWPE, 48wt.% HDPE and 2wt.% CNTs showed the lowest deformation on the meniscus surface. In addition, a proposed prototype of a polymeric material for the design of the meniscus has been manufactured by a CNC machine. The dimension trueness and accuracy of fabricated prototype as metrological characteristics for knee meniscus replacement are also evaluated. Moreover, uncertainty estimation for dimensional measurement has been studied and confirmed the confidence degree of the fabrication accuracy for the proposed prototype.