Experimental characterization and micromechanical modeling of the elastic response of the human humerus under bending impact

This paper investigates the characterization and numerical modeling of the elastic behavior of the human humerus bone using a recently developed micromechanical approach coupled to nanoindentation measurements. At first, standard three-point bending experiments were conducted under low static loading, using several humerus diaphysis in order to identify the apparent elastic modulus of the bone in static regime. Then, a drop tower impact experiment was used on the same set of humerus diaphysis specimens, in order to assess the elastic modulus in dynamic regime. These measurements will be used as reference bases for comparison purpose. The originality of this work, lies in the coupling between a two-phase micromechanical approach based on Mori-Tanaka homogenization scheme for cylindrical voids and nanoindentation measurements of the elastic modulus of the bone matrix phase. This model has been implemented using a user defined material subroutine VMAT in ABAQUS© Explicit code. The bone mechanical response prediction using the proposed methodology was validated against previous standard experimental data. Finally, it was shown that the numerical predictions are consistent with the physical measurements obtained on human humerus via the good estimation of the ultimate impact load. •Experimental Characterization of the human humerus bone mechanical behaviour under static and dynamic bending loading.•We perform a micromechanical characterization of the humeral bone elastic modulus by nanoindentation tests.•Theoretical formulation of a micromechanics based elastic model for humeral bone.•Multi-scale Finite Element model of a human humerus bone under impact.•The model predicts adequately the experimental results via the estimation of the ultimate impact load of the human humerus.