Mark Sidebottom Mechanical Engineering student ‘13 collaborated with Dr. Manish Paliwal this past summer to study friction induced squeak in ceramic hip replacements. This was Mark’s second year participating in TCNJ’s Mentoring Undergraduate Summer Experience (MUSE) research program. This year he worked alongside seven other projects within the School of Engineering which can be found here.
Ceramic type hip implants are common in the prosthetics field as they are highly compatible to the human body and have a long working life due to the low wear conditions of ceramics. However, a major problem exists in 1-10% of implants, vibration induced squeak. Their goal was to investigate possible factors attributing to squeaking and to better understand the phenomenon by analyzing a donated ceramic hip joint. With a better understanding of the phenomenon, manufactures of this type of hip replacement may be able to spot imperfections and prevent squeak prone designs. Mark and Dr. Paliwal will be attending the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ IMEC conference in Houston, Texas to present their findings.
Mark would like to thank Dr. Paliwal for his guidance, Dr. Allen for donating the hip implant, and the MUSE program for this opportunity. Additionally, he had this to say about the program:
”You learn more than what textbooks can teach you. You don’t have exact instructions, solutions to check your answers, or a guarantee that you will succeed. All you have is the challenge, your enthusiasm, and hopefully in the end, the reward of results.”
Information about applying to the MUSE program and a list of other MUSE projects can be found: Here and https://fscollab.pages.tcnj.edu/.