A rolling-gliding wear simulator for the investigation of tribological material pairings for application in total knee arthroplasty
Creators: name: Richter, Berna I.
name: Ostermeier, Sven
name: Turger, Anke
name: Denkena, Berend
name: Hurschler, Christof
Publisher: name: London : BioMed Central Ltd.
Year: 2010
Subjects: subject: Knee joint
subject: Knee joint replacement
subject: Material wear
subject: Motion cycle
subject: Pin on disc
subject: Plane geometry
subject: Promising materials
subject: Ring-on-disc
subject: Rolling movement
subject: Test results
subject: Total knee arthroplasty
subject: User intervention
subject: Wear measurements
subject: Wear rates
subject: Wear simulators
subject: Wear test
subject: Cobalt
subject: Joint prostheses
subject: Joints (anatomy)
subject: Materials testing
subject: Polyethylenes
subject: Surface roughness
subject: Surgery
subject: Thermoplastics
subject: Ceramic materials
subject: cobalt
subject: polyethylene
subject: article
subject: biological model
subject: ceramics
subject: femur
subject: instrumentation
subject: knee arthroplasty
subject: materials testing
subject: methodology
subject: motion
subject: surface property
subject: tibia
subject: Arthroplasty, Replacement, Knee
subject: Ceramics
subject: Femur
subject: Materials Testing
subject: Models, Biological
subject: Motion
subject: Polyethylene
subject: Surface Properties
subject: Tibia
subject: Dewey Decimal Classification::600 | Technik
subject: Dewey Decimal Classification::600 | Technik::610 | Medizin, Gesundheit
subject: Dewey Decimal Classification::500 | Naturwissenschaften::570 | Biowissenschaften, Biologie

description: Background: Material wear testing is an important technique in the development and evaluation of materials for use in implant for total knee arthroplasty. Since a knee joint induces a complex rolling-gliding movement, standardised material wear testing devices such as Pin-on-Disc or Ring-on-Disc testers are suitable to only a limited extent because they generate pure gliding motion only.Methods: A rolling-gliding wear simulator was thus designed, constructed and implemented, which simulates and reproduces the rolling-gliding movement and loading of the knee joint on specimens of simplified geometry. The technical concept was to run a base-plate, representing the tibia plateau, against a pivoted cylindrical counter-body, representing one femur condyle under an axial load. A rolling movement occurs as a result of the friction and pure gliding is induced by limiting the rotation of the cylindrical counter-body. The set up also enables simplified specimens handling and removal for gravimetrical wear measurements. Long-term wear tests and gravimetrical wear measurements were carried out on the well known material pairings: cobalt chrome-polyethylene, ceramic-polyethylene and ceramic-ceramic, over three million motion cycles to allow material comparisons to be made.Results: The observed differences in wear rates between cobalt-chrome on polyethylene and ceramic on polyethylene pairings were similar to the differences of published data for existing material-pairings. Test results on ceramic-ceramic pairings of different frontal-plane geometry and surface roughness displayed low wear rates and no fracture failures.Conclusions: The presented set up is able to simulate the rolling-gliding movement of the knee joint, is easy to use, and requires a minimum of user intervention or monitoring. It is suitable for long-term testing, and therefore a useful tool for the investigation of new and promising materials which are of interest for application in knee joint replacement implants.