ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the modeling of damage behavior of bone. As described in the previous section, damage accumulation is an established feature of the nonlinear behavior of bone. However, it is seldom incorporated into stress analysis models of bones. The most obvious reason is that for most circumstances, it is simply unnecessary. Creep damage or low-cycle fatigue damage, i.e., damage resulting from high imposed strains, is an unlikely occurrence under normal loading for bone. High-cycle fatigue damage, i.e., damage accumulating at low strain amplitudes, is probably occurring routinely, but is usually repaired by normal bone turnover. Hence, stress analyses of skeletal structures usually do not require the incorporation of any damage process. This is also true for other complications in modeling bone mechanics, e.g., viscous or plastic behavior. Nonetheless, there are several good reasons for attempting to develop mathematical models for the damaging behavior of bone.