The knee joint is one of the more important parts in the human body. Its continuous involvement in the human movement makes it prone to breakage. Due to small contact area, the contact pressure is quite large in this joint. Therefore, the understanding of stresses behavior in knee joint contact is a necessity. In this study, we investigated the stresses behavior in the tibial insert by FEA. A two-dimensional FE model representing the knee joint contact mechanism was created. In the elastic simulation, the contact pressure dropped by 0.2% when the coefficient of friction (CoF) was added. While in the plastic simulation it rose by 12.06%. The average contact pressure fell by 36.42% of the inclusion of plasticity. The CoF lowered the Tresca stress by 0.16% and 12.37% in the elastic and plastic simulation, respectively. Meanwhile, the inclusion of plasticity decreased the average Tresca stress by 74.25%. The CoF, in the elastic simulation, decreased the compressive and tensile stress by 3.29% and 12.46%, respectively. Conversely, in the plastic simulation the compressive stress and tensile rose by 12.01% and 8.20%, respectively. Meanwhile, the inclusion of plasticity caused the compressive stress to decrease by 70.50% and tensile stress to increase by 72.06%.
Keywords: Total knee replacement; UHMWPE; two-dimensional finite element analysis.