A SURVEY OF RECENT COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES FOR THE IN-SILICO WEAR DETERMINATION IN TOTAL HIP REPLACEMENTS CONSIDERING SYNOVIAL LUBRICATION EFFECTS AND MUSCULOSKELETAL DYNAMICS

The aim of this survey was to briefly describe the latest research achievements obtained at the Department of Industrial Engineering of the University of Salerno by the research group leading by the Author, in the framework of the computational (bio) tribology and biomechanics, applied to artificial human synovial joints. In the framework of biotribology a challenging and interesting topic is represented by the possibility to predict in-silico the wear of the artificial implants, considering and modelling also the complex phenomena acting in the joints due to the synovial lubrication. With reference to the Total Hip Replacements (THR), in this manuscript were underlined recent computational approaches obtained by merging multibody models, solving the inverse dynamics of musculoskeletal systems, and synovial mixed elasto-hydrodynamic lubrication models. The achieved results, mainly in terms of wear volume prediction, were validated respect to in-vitro experiments considering standardized joint loading and are very promising, encouraging the research team toward the investigation and the development of more and more accurate models.