Friction behavior of coupling motion for natural articular cartilage by reciprocating rotation

Based on the irregular surface of natural cartilage configurations, the tribological characteristics of coupling motion between natural cartilage pairs were investigated by the variation of rotated offset and velocity. Contact displacement, contact load, friction force and coefficient of friction from natural cartilage pairs were measured by a UMT-2 testing machine. In order to obtain the steady part and wavy part, the contact load and contact displacement were decompounded by the five-point sliding average method. These results showed that the contact load was composed of steady load and wavy load. And the contact displacement was composed of cartilage deformation and surface outline. The steady load was similar to exterior load while natural cartilage deformation increased nonlinearly with the sliding time. Wavy load had the correlative coefficient 0.235 with surface outline due to the irregular surface of friction configurations. The coefficient of friction from cartilage friction configurations was less influenced by smaller magnitude in rotated parameters. A few strange summits were obtained in the area of coefficient of friction, and significantly related with local minimal values corresponding to the contact loads. The rotated offsets had clear impact on contact load and a slight impact on contact displacement. Larger offset produced higher wavy magnitude of the contact load. The rotated velocities played an evident role in cartilage deformation, but had a less influence on contact load. Lower velocity brought larger cartilage deformation. Contributed equally to this work Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 50535050)