Professor Peter Zioupos P.Zioupos@hull.ac.uk
Emeritus Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Professor Peter Zioupos P.Zioupos@hull.ac.uk
Emeritus Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Helmut O.K. Kirchner
Herwig Peterlik
Human bone becomes increasingly brittle with ageing. Bones also fracture differently under slow and fast loadings, being ductile and brittle, respectively. The effects of a combination of these two factors have never been examined before. Here we show that cortical bone is most fracture-resistant at the physiologically prevalent intermediate strain rates of 10−3 s−1 to 10−2 s−1 such as they occur in walking or running, slightly weaker at slower quasistatic and much weaker at fast impact loading rates. In young cortical bone (15 years of age) the ductile-to-brittle transition (DBT) occurs at strain rates of 10−2 s−1, in old cortical bone (85 yrs) at speeds lower by a factor of 10 to 40. Other research has shown that the energy required to break bone (per unit of fracture surface) drops as much as 60% between these two ages. Therefore, DBT seems to compound the well-known phenomenon of ‘brittle old bones’. Old bones can only cope with slow movement, young ones with both slow and fast movement. These observed material characteristics of (i) a shift of the DBT and (ii) a reduced energy absorption capacity appear to contribute at least as much to the loss of bone quality as the various quantity based (lowered bone density and mineral content) explanations of the past. They also provide a new powerful paradigm, which allows us to demonstrate mechanically, and uniquely, how human bone becomes increasingly brittle with age.
Zioupos, P., Kirchner, H. O., & Peterlik, H. (2020). Ageing bone fractures: The case of a ductile to brittle transition that shifts with age. Bone, 131, Article 115176. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bone.2019.115176
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Nov 24, 2019 |
Online Publication Date | Dec 9, 2019 |
Publication Date | Feb 1, 2020 |
Deposit Date | May 9, 2023 |
Publicly Available Date | May 9, 2023 |
Journal | Bone |
Print ISSN | 8756-3282 |
Publisher | Elsevier |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 131 |
Article Number | 115176 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bone.2019.115176 |
Public URL | https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4287162 |
Accepted manuscript
(571 Kb)
PDF
Publisher Licence URL
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Copyright Statement
Published by Elsevier. This is the Author Accepted Manuscript issued with: Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives License (CC:BY:NC:ND 4.0).
Proceedings: SimBio-M 2024 (ed. Peter Zioupos, Christophe Bastien)
(2024)
Presentation / Conference Contribution
Quantifying microcracks on fractured bone surfaces – Potential use in forensic anthropology
(2023)
Journal Article
About Repository@Hull
Administrator e-mail: repository@hull.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2025
Advanced Search