Design and Mechanical Analysis of a Promising Hip Prosthesis Using Quaternions

Overview

Objectives/Goals Conventional ball-and-socket hip prostheses suffer from challenges that include painful dislocation requiring surgical revision, material wear, and bio-contamination from wear particles leading to bone loss and prosthesis failure. A new hip prosthesis design to address these problems has been developed, modeled mathematically, and tested in a laboratory framework. The first objective of the study is to analyze and validate the improved movement range of the new, patent-pending hip prosthesis design employing a gimbal or universal joint. A second objective is to determine load-carrying capacity and predict durability under day-to-day loading. Methods/Materials The investigation, modeling and analysis and validation of both joint motions and forces has been performed both using a hand-made physical model with an instrumented skeleton and test frame and through a computer using the Mathematica(R) Language with conventional Eulerian Angle transformations and Quaternion approaches. Results Adding not just one but two rotational bearings to a standard Universal joint is found to create an extra degree of rotational freedom enabling a greater range of motion. The extra rotation comes into play when the U-joint nears a position when the three rotational axes lose their linear independence - a condition termed gimbal lock in the mathematics and aerospace vocabulary. Conclusions/Discussion The ability of the U-joint prosthesis to operate smoothly and safely with adequate range of motion, last indefinitely due to minimal friction U-joint designs, maintain isolation from the body to reduce possible infection of the joint, and not be dislocated shows potential improvement over existing prostheses and worthy of future study and clinical experimentation. The durable design may find applications to other joints of the body, including shoulder and knees.

Awards (1)

• Third Place

Competition history

• CSEF 2018 Applied Mechanics & Structures · Entry S0317

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Engineering projects
• CSEF Engineering projects
• Every CSEF 2018 project
• CSEF Third Place winners