Modeling of anisotropic remodeling of trabecular bone coupled to fracture

As a living tissue, bone is subjected to internal evolutions of its trabecular architecture under normal everyday mechanical loadings leading to damage. The repeating bone remodeling cycle aims at repairing the damaged zones in order to maintain bone structural integrity; this activity of sensing the peak stress at locations where damage or microcracks have occurred, removing old bone and apposing new bone is achieved thanks to a complicated machinery at the cellular level involving specialized cells (osteocytes, osteoclasts, and osteoblasts). This work aims at developing an integrated remodeling-to-fracture model to simulate the bone remodeling process, considering trabecular bone anisotropy. The effective anisotropic continuum mechanical properties of the trabecular bone are derived from an initially discrete planar hexagonal structure representative of femur bone microstructure, relying on the asymptotic homogenization technique. This leads to scaling laws of the effective elastic properties of bone versus effective density at an intermediate mesoscopic scale. An evolution law for the local bone apparent density is formulated in the framework of the thermodynamics of irreversible processes, whereby the driving force for density evolutions is identified as the local strain energy density weighted by the locally accumulated microdamage. We adopt a classical nonlinear damage model for high cycle fatigue under purely elastic strains, where the assumed homogeneous damage is related to the number of cycles bone experiences. Based on this model, we simulate bone remodeling for the chosen initial microstructure, showing the influence of the external mechanical stimuli on the evolution of the density of bone and the incidence of this evolution on trabecular bone effective mechanical properties.