A preliminary biomechanical study of a novel carbon-fibre hip implant versus standard metallic hip implants

Total hip arthroplasty is a widespread surgical approach for treating severe osteoarthritis of the human hip. Aseptic loosening of standard metallic hip implants due to stress shielding and bone loss has motivated the development of new materials for hip prostheses. Numerically, a three-dimensional finite element (FE) model that mimicked hip implants was used to compare a new hip stem to two commercially available implants. The hip implants simulated were a novel CF/PA12 carbon-fibre polyamide-based composite hip stem, the Exeter hip stem (Stryker, Mahwah, NJ, USA), and the Omnifit Eon (Stryker, Mahwah, NJ, USA). A virtual axial load of 3 kN was applied to the FE model. Strain and stress distributions were computed. Experimentally, the three hip stems had their distal portions rigidly mounted and had strain gauges placed along the surface at 3 medial and 3 lateral locations. Axial loads of 3 kN were applied. Measurements of axial stiffness and strain were taken and compared to FE analysis. The overall linear correlation between FE model versus experimental strains showed reasonable results for the lines-of-best-fit for the Composite (Pearson R(2)=0.69, slope=0.82), Exeter (Pearson R(2)=0.78, slope=0.59), and Omnifit (Pearson R(2)=0.66, slope=0.45), with some divergence for the most distal strain locations. From FE analysis, the von Mises stress range for the Composite stem was much lower than that in the Omnifit and Exeter implants by 200% and 45%, respectively. The preliminary experiments showed that the Composite stem stiffness (1982 N/mm) was lower than the metallic hip stem stiffnesses (Exeter, 2460 N/mm; Omnifit, 2543 N/mm). This is the first assessment of stress, strain, and stiffness of the CF/PA12 carbon-fibre hip stem compared to standard commercially-available devices.