Squeak in hip endoprosthesis systems: An experimental study and a numerical technique to analyze design variants

Hip endoprosthesis systems are analyzed with respect to their susceptibility to self-excited vibrations and sound or noise generation. Experimental studies reveal that certain configurations can become unstable causing exponentially growing regular high-frequency oscillations that asymptotically approach a limit-cycle with considerable amplitude. Ultimately the vibrations do also lead to the emission of sound that is perceived as squeaking or squeal. To identify dominant influence factors and critical parameters, stability analyses were conducted on the basis of finite-element modeling. The resulting numerical approach, based on the determination of complex eigenvalues and eigenvectors, is shown to be an effective tool to analyze and show differences between endoprosthesis designs with respect to their susceptibility to develop squeaking phenomenons.