THE EFFECTS OF MESH STYLE ON THE FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS FOR ARTIFICIAL HIP JOINTS

Abstract

In this paper, a good quality mesh generation for the finite element method is investigated for artificial hip joint simulations. In general, bad meshes with a large aspect ratio or mixed elements can give rise to excessively long computational running times and extremely high errors. Typically, hexahedral elements outperform tetrahedral elements during three-dimensional contact analysis using the finite element method. Therefore, it is essential to mesh biologic structures with hexahedral elements. Four meshing schemes for the finite element analysis of an artificial hip joint are presented and compared: (1) tetrahedral elements, (2) wedge and hexahedral elements, (3) open cubic box hexahedral elements, and (4) proposed hexahedral elements. The proposed meshing scheme is to partition a part before seeding so that we have a high quality three-dimensional mesh which consists of only hexahedral elements. The von Mises stress distributions were obtained and analyzed. We also performed mesh refinement convergence tests for all four cases.