Characterization and micromechanical modeling of the human cranial bone elastic properties

This paper is devoted to the experimental characterization and micromechanical modeling of the elastic behavior of the human cranial bone. Three points bending tests on the frontal, parietal and temporal bone specimens have been performed to determine their mechanical characteristics under quasi-static loading. It is shown that Young's modulus and the bending stiffness are significantly influenced by the bone morphology and orientation. The anis otropic bone elastic properties have been then estimated by means of the Mori-Tanaka homogenization scheme coupled to experimental measurements of structural anisotropy by microtomography techniques. The obtained micromechanical model has been implemented as an UMAT routine within the explicit dynamics code LS-DYNA (R) and applied successfully for the estimation of the mechanical properties of the human cranial frontal bone. The obtained numerical results show an overall good agreement when compared to the experimental data. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.