The Acoustic Emission (AE) technique has been described as possessing ‘many of the qualities of an ideal damage-monitoring technique’, and has been used previously in orthopaedic testing.
However, these investigations were restricted to in-vitro testing with surface mounted sensors. In this project, the potential was investigated for directly embedding AE sensors within the femoral stem itself, for better failure prediction. Proprietary AE sensors were developed and used with an in-vitro demonstration of the methodology, using nominal implanted constructs. The results of the AE data were compared with micro-CT images from pre- and post- testing. The work demonstrated the feasibility of the AE embedded sensors, which could be considered as the first step towards an in-vivo self-monitoring implant.
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