Detection of degradation in polyester implants by analysing mode shapes of structure vibration.

This paper presents a numerical study on using vibration analysis to detect degradation in degrading polyesters. A numerical model of a degrading plate sample is considered. The plate is assumed to degrade following the typical behaviour of amorphous copolymers of polylactide and polyglycolide. Due to the well-known autocatalytic effect in the degradation of these polyesters, the inner core of the plate degrades faster than outer surface region, forming layers of materials with varying Young׳s modulus. Firstly the change in molecular weight and corresponding change in Young׳s modulus at different times are calculated using the mathematical models developed in our previous work. Secondly the first four mode shapes of transverse vibration of the plate are calculated using the finite element method. Finally the curvature of the mode shapes are calculated and related to the spatial distribution of the polymer degradation. It is shown that the curvature of the mode shapes can be used to detect the onset and distribution of polymer degradation. The level of measurement accuracy required in an experiment is presented to guide practical applications of the method. At the end of this paper a demonstration case of coronary stent is presented showing how the method can be used to detect degradation in an implant of sophisticated structure.

A constitutive law for degrading bioresorbable polymers.

This paper presents a constitutive law that predicts the changes in elastic moduli, Poisson's ratio and ultimate tensile strength of bioresorbable polymers due to biodegradation. During biodegradation, long polymer chains are cleaved by hydrolysis reaction. For semi-crystalline polymers, the chain scissions also lead to crystallisation. Treating each scission as a cavity and each new crystal as a solid inclusion, a degrading semi-crystalline polymer can be modelled as a continuum solid containing randomly distributed cavities and crystal inclusions. The effective elastic properties of a degrading polymer are calculated using existing theories for such solid and the tensile strength of the degrading polymer is predicted using scaling relations that were developed for porous materials. The theoretical model for elastic properties and the scaling law for strength form a complete constitutive relation for the degrading polymers. It is shown that the constitutive law can capture the trend of the experimental data in the literature for a range of biodegradable polymers fairly well.