Mechanical Properties of Bone Cement Affected by Porosity

Hip and knee replacement operations mostly utilize the cementing procedure, which determines the biocompatibility relevance of bone cement, a porous material, which is filled with the body fluid after surgery. The paper proposes a computer model of the bone cement mechanical behavior with explicit and implicit analyses of different-size pores, including isolated macropores. The multilevel simulation utilizes the movable cellular automaton method. The mechanical behavior of test samples, both dry and containing the body fluid, is studied under uniaxial compression and four-point bending. Nonlinear porosity dependences are detected for elastic and strength properties of bone cement during compression tests.