Finite Element Analysis of Four Different Plate Designs Used for Internal Fixation of Mandibular Condylar Fracture

Abstract

The mandibular condylar fractures have high incidence among all types of facial bone fracture. Treatment of this type of fracture had a controversy discussion over the years more than any other topic in maxillofacial truma. Recently most of maxillofacial surgeons prefrer open reduction in majority (within indications) of cases due to its optimal results in compare with closed reduction .the choice of the most stable design of implant to fix mandibular condylar fractures should adapt to configuration of mandibular condyle ,size of the condyle ,type of bone and biomechanichal behavior of tempromandibular joint. Using of FEA method has becom an accurate method to predict clinical behavior of the implant used for fixation, also it can predict faliur, provided that all steps were accurate and validated with clinical experiments. The process of finite element in this study start with using computed tomography for optaing geometrty of human mandible, then transfer data to CAD programme to develop 3D model. Three dimention mandibular model transferred to anthys programme, material properities, costrains and load applied to the model. Finite element programme manipulate data and gave results in term of stress and displacement in form of graphs, numbers and animated output. In this study, we performed simulations and analysed the effect of three main jaw movement (opening, clenching and protrusion) tasks on the biomechanical behaviours of condylar base fracture osteosynthesis and surrounding bone. Our observations are as follows: