Publication Date
2019
Document Type
Thesis
Committee Members
Tarun Goswami (Committee Chair), Caroline Cao (Committee Member), Ulas Sunar (Committee Member)
Degree Name
Master of Science in Biomedical Engineering (MSBME)
Abstract
Every year in the United States roughly 300,000 people over the age of 65 suffer from a hip fracture. Ninety five percent of which are the result from a fall. The resulting hip fracture can be classified into several categories of fracture. Depending on the damage the patient could be implanted with a femoral nail device to assist in their recovery. These devices can, however, have complications during recovery. In some cases, these nails can have a failure rate as high as 10%. When failure occurs, extensive investigations are needed to determine the causes of failure. These investigations involve physical examination, testing for material and chemical properties, and numerical computation with computer simulations. The results from this investigation show that the nail investigated may have accrued damage from the implantation process. There is evidence of internal crack propagation leading to device failure. Simulations performed indicate that if the nail was operating in a femur with a subtrochanteric fracture the internal forces may have been 50% higher than that of a normal femur, significantly more than any fracture type.
Page Count
93
Department or Program
Department of Biomedical, Industrial & Human Factors Engineering
Year Degree Awarded
2019
Copyright
Copyright 2019, some rights reserved. My ETD may be copied and distributed only for non-commercial purposes and may not be modified. All use must give me credit as the original author.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
ORCID ID
0000-0002-1669-6861
