Numerical and experimental structural analysis of trabecular architectures

This paper presents the application of the Cell Method to the static analysis of 3D structures obtained from micro-computed tomography reconstructions of trabecular bone. The Cell Method is a recently introduced numerical method, based on a direct discrete formulation of equilibrium equations, which is particularly promising for the analysis of complex structures. In fact, due to the direct discrete approach employed, no restriction is imposed by differentiability conditions and the characteristic length of the elementary cell of the discretization can be of the same order of magnitude as the heterogeneities of the structure. The same 3D microstructures used for the numerical simulations were reproduced by means of a rapid prototyping process, by selective laser sintering of polyamide powder. The compression elastic modulus of the replicas was experimentally determined and used as parameter for comparison with the simulations results. The experimental values are in good agreement with the numerical ones, thus validating the methodology employed.