[Finite element analysis (FEA) for the structure capacity of proximal femur during falling--(I) FEA model and the failure criteria for the bone].

Femur fracture from falls is considered one of the most serious types of the elderly. FEA has proved to be an extremely useful tool in the structure analysis of the proximal femur. In this paper, a FEA model of proximal femur is introduced, and Hoffman failure criteria are built based on the experimental strength data for both cortical bone and trabecular bone of the femur from some references. The FEA model and the failure criteria are verified using other researcher's experimental results. The predicted trabecular failure load was only 0.5% lower than the experimental data and cortical failure load was 4.2% higher than the experimental result. This result shows that our FEA model, combined with the Hoffman criterion for both cortical bone and trabecular bone, can effectively predict the structural capacity of the femur during falling.