Understanding the fundamentals of bone health and disease are essential when developing tools for the prevention, detection, and treatment of bone fractures. For this purpose, Centre for Bioengineering and Biotechnology Member Dr. Thomas Willett, who is also the Director of the Composite Biomaterials Systems Lab and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Systems Design Engineering, is developing a tool to explore the mechanical properties of cortical bone, fracture behavior, and factors associated with aging and disease that affect fracture toughness.
In the Composite Biomaterial Systems Lab, Professor Willett conducts research exploring bone quality and fragility, and develops bone mimetic materials for skeletal reconstruction. To assist with this research project, Professor Willett has taken on Raphael Badaoui, a Master’s Student from the University of Technology of Compiègne, France, as part of the student exchange program between Sorbonne Universities and the University of Waterloo.
In the lab, Professor Willett and his team utilize an optical microscope-based version of the method of Digital Image Correlation (DIC), an alternative method to classical displacement and strain measurement techniques, to analyze crack initiation and propagation in bone and bone mimetic materials. Professor Willett comments that DIC is “especially important,” when looking at these properties, as DIC allows for full-field displacement and strain measurement around a crack tip providing greater information regarding the fracture process. With this information, the goal is to develop a tool to better measure fracture toughness, observe fracture mechanisms, and validate computational models.
In the long run, this tool will allow for a better understanding of how bone, a high performance natural material, becomes of poor quality and degrades with aging and disease. It will be used to study aging and bone affecting diseases from cadaveric materials of donors who are healthy, aging, and/or have different diseases. With this analysis, experimental and computational models can be developed to determine both correlation and causation of why such degradation occurs, which can give way to the development of more effective approaches to detect, prevent, and treat bone diseases.
More on Professor Willett's work can be seen on his lab page.