A NUMERICAL STUDY COMPARING THE INFLUENCE OF SHEAR AND AXIAL LOAD ON FRACTURE CALLUS HEALING

Secondary fracture healing processes are strongly influenced by interfragmentary motion. Shear movement is assumed to be more critical than axial movement, however experimental results are controversial. Numerical fracture healing models allow to simulate the fracture healing process with variation of single input parameters and under comparable normalized mechanical conditions. Therefore, a direct comparison of different in vivo scenarios is possible. The aim of this study was to simulate fracture healing under several axial and shear movement scenarios and compare their respective time to heal. We hypothesize that shear movement is always more critical than axial loading. For the presented study, we used a corroborated numerical model for fracture healing in sheep. Numerous variations of the movement amplitude, the fracture gap size and the musculoskeletal loads were simulated for comparable axial compressive and shear load cases. In all simulated cases, axial compressive load had less inhibitory influe...