A Parametric Model of the Human Knee

The working title for this when I was writing a presentation for the Abaqus UK RUM was ‘How I Improved a Mesh and the Results got Better’. That is probably selling things a bit short, but essentially this article is about applying well tried finite element techniques to problematic multiscale, multiphysics scenarios to achieve results in a useful timeframe – which probably goes a bit further than mesh refinement.

In some scenarios the human knee is treated as a simple hinge, like you’d find on a door. But one look at Gray’s Anatomy reveals it to be anything but a simple hinge. The two bearing surfaces are surrounded by ligaments, and between them is a compliant pad known as the meniscus. The load path through this assembly is anything but simple, and certainly nothing like a hinge. Which gives us the first clue as to the multiscale nature of this body part. At one level it’s a sort of single degree of freedom hinge, but deeper into the length scales its more complex, and gets more complex still the deeper you go.

T​his article appeared in the January 2023 issue of BENCHMARK