Research on topology optimization method of bone plate for rabbit femur.

The diagnosis and treatment of the special types of the fractures faces an important challenge for the hand and foot surgery. Due to the mismatch between the mechanical properties of traditional solid plate materials and bones, the high stiffness and density pose a risk of fatigue fracture caused by excessive stress levels. In this paper, the topology optimization method of the bone plate for the rabbit femur based on the finite element analysis is present. This method focuses on designing the mechanical structure based on the initial pore layout of the bone plates by searching for the material density distribution within a predetermined domain. By reducing the total volume of the bone plate, the design objective of minimizing the strain energy is implemented to control the mechanical stress and displacement for avoiding the stress concentration and geometric deformation. Finite element method is utilized to construct the relationships between the material density and strain energy, which clearly characterizes the mechanical properties under different volume fractions. The results show that compared with the initial design, the proposed method effectively addresses the issues of the stress concentration, meanwhile obviously reducing the mass of the bone plate and preferably fitting to the bone surface.