This paper describes a new modeling approach to the principal bones of the ankle/foot model. The most often injured ankle/foot bones in vehicle accidents are the tarsal bones, particularly the calcaneum, the talus, the navicular and the cuboid, and the fibular and tibial malleoli. These bones are therefore modeled as deformable bodies. The cortical bone is modeled by shell elements while the trabecular bone is modeled independently by solid elements. Both meshes are connected via a tied contact interface that permits to tie arbitrarily meshed solid to shell surfaces, including finite normal gaps. Both types of elements use linear elastic materials. The new deformable bone finite element modeling (FEM) technique is validated for the dorsiflexion impact loading as was done previously for the model with rigid bones. The influence of modeling with deformable bones is studied, in particular, concerning the kinetic response. Some first order effects, such as soft contact padding and attenuation through energy dissipation have been identified in the study and modeled via equivalent springs, as well as internal material and external relative motion damping. (A)
Abstract