STRUCTURAL VALIDATION OF INTRAMEDULLARY NAILS: FROM EXPERIMENTATION TO VIRTUAL TESTING

Closed intramedullary nailing has become the "gold standard" in the treatment of displaced fractures of the tibial shaft. The material of choice for the manufacturing of intramedullary nails is Ti-alloy, while the structural performance requested to these components is steadily growing. Validation procedures pertaining to these components comprehend both compression and torsion tests. Finite element analysis could help shrinking down the time required for new product development, as fewer full scale experimental tests would be needed in the early design stages. In order for numerical models to be representative of the actual test, a number of parameters has to be accurately chosen: particularly, contact modeling must be fine-tuned based on experimental data. This contribution provides guidelines for the correct contact settings to use, referring to the Ansys software.