During the preliminary research and idea generation stage, I proposed two ideas that have the potential the reduce to effect of aseptic loosening.
The first idea focused on the materials. The new materials used should have low elastic modulus, high corrosion resistance, and high wear resistance.
The second idea was to change the shape of the femoral stem. For example, we can introduce porous coatings to the surface of the femoral stem that resemble that of a real bone. In addition, the cross-section of the femoral can be double trapezoidal to spread the stress.
After discussing the advantages and disadvantages of each member’s ideas, our group come up with our first set of ideas.
The first modification was to add a piston to the femoral stem which serves as a shock absorber.
The second modification was to introduce synthetic synovial fluid to reduce the friction between the acetabular cup and femoral head.;
For the second iteration, the piston was moved closer to the femoral head to re-distribute the load and reduce stress shielding. And the idea of the synovial fluid remained unchanged.
This idea was removed from our final design because the load was redistributed to only one area of the bone and we could not feasibly distribute the force across the entire bone using the piston.
