Stress and strain in cortical and trabecular bone and soft tissue, stress shielding and Wolff's Law, fatigue S-N behavior for implant materials, and implant load analysis.
Bone is not a homogeneous material but a hierarchical composite whose mechanical behavior differs sharply between cortical bone's dense, roughly 17-20 GPa longitudinal stiffness and trabecular bone's porous, order-of-magnitude-lower apparent modulus, and this module builds the biomechanics foundation from that anisotropic behavior through soft tissue viscoelasticity and hysteresis under cyclic loading.
It then works through stress shielding — the bone resorption that follows when a stiff metallic implant carries load that would otherwise pass through adjacent bone, driven by Wolff's Law's remodeling response to mechanical stimulus — alongside fatigue S-N curve analysis for implant materials under millions of physiological loading cycles, and closes by tying implant load analysis back to the biomaterials selection in Module 4 and the prosthetics and orthotics design covered later in Module 13.