Abstract
Lubrication plays an important role in the clinical performance of the ceramic-on-ceramic (CoC) hip implant in terms of reducing wear and avoiding squeaking. All the previous lubrication analyses of CoC hip implants assumed that synovial fluid was sufficiently supplied to the contact area. The aim of this study was to investigate the lubrication performance of the CoC hip implant under starved conditions. A starved lubrication model was presented for the CoC hip implant. The model was solved using multi-grid techniques. Results showed that the fluid film thickness of the CoC hip implant was affected by fluid supply conditions: with the increase in the supplied fluid layer, the lubrication film thickness approached to that of the fully blooded solution; when the available fluid layer reduced to some level, the fluid film thickness considerably decreased with the supplying condition. The above finding provides new insights into the lubrication performance of hip implants.
Highlights
Hip arthroplasty has shown excellent outcomes in decreasing pain and restoring function in patients with degenerative hip joint diseases
Lubrication plays an important role in the clinical performance of the CoC hip implant
The results indicated that under severely starved conditions, the fluid film thickness considerably decreased with the supplied fluid layer (Figs. 6 and 7)
Summary
Hip arthroplasty has shown excellent outcomes in decreasing pain and restoring function in patients with degenerative hip joint diseases. The ceramic-on-ceramic (CoC) hip implant is increasingly used due to its outstanding tribological and biocompatible properties. Lubrication plays an important role in the clinical performance of the CoC hip implant. Poor lubrication is one potential reason of squeaking noise, which is an audible phenomenon receiving increasing concerns (Jarrett et al, 2009), of CoC hip implants (Chevillotte et al, 2010). Under deprived lubrication conditions, such as edge loading that occurs when the contact patch between the acetabular and femoral components extends over the rim of the cup, wear of CoC hip bearings significantly increases (AlHajjar et al, 2013). Poor lubrication increases friction of hip implants which itself can cause loosening (Bishop et al, 2013). Understanding the lubrication mechanism of CoC hip implants is extremely important
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