Affiliation:
1. Institute of Mechanics of Materials Ruhr‐Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany
Abstract
AbstractThe prevalence of osteoporosis is about one in three for women and one in five for men over the age of fifty, making it the most common bone disease worldwide. The disease is characterized by a reduction of the amount of volume percent of cortical bone, weakening the bone and increasing the likelihood of fractures. Modeling and numerical simulations can be used to better understand effects observed in measurements and thus the workings of human bones. Furthermore, they can be used to support the development of new diagnostic tools such as sonography. For this purpose, in previous contributions we developed a two‐scale bone model that considers mechanical, electric and magnetic effects. To connect the scales, we resorted to the finite element square method . For diagnostics, the main quantity of interest is the resulting magnetic field strength, which can be used to draw conclusions about the bone health. In this contribution, we investigate the influence of the used microstructure model in detail. We created different representative volume elements (RVEs), which are for example, randomly orientated, anisotropic, or differ in shape or mesh resolution. In addition, we consider the use of different shape functions in the finite element calculation. We compare our findings with previous results, which were obtained using only regular RVEs. We investigate the extent, to which the microscale results and the overall macroscale simulation results are affected by the choice of the RVE.