Trabecular bone is most involved in diseases such as osteoporosis and in prosthesis fixation.
The overall long-term goal of this work is to develop computational modeling techniques that can be used to investigate the effects of aging and disease on the mechanical behavior of this material. Over the past three years with funding from LLNL, we have successfully developed and optimized the parallel finite element codes to solve this class of problems, with models having up to 5 million elements. We now describe our work on the numerical convergence behavior of this technique, and applications to prediction of lower level material problems of this cellular network, as well as simulation of mechanical testing techniques, and investigation of failure behavior and mechanisms.