Department of Orthopaedics

Testing Facilities

The following equipment are readily available at the laboratory: MTS Servo hydraulic testing machine; hip simulator fixture to simulate single-legged stance and stair climbing loads with joint and abductor loading; laser displacement device, optical markers and PC data acquisition systems, computer-controlled three axes CNC milling machine; creep testing machine, materials testing and evaluation laboratories.

MTS Hydraulic Testing Machine

Instrumentation and Fixturing Laboratory

Within the laboratory, clinicians, fellows, residents and other researchers are able to utilize various instrumentation systems that allow measurements including, but not limited to, strain, displacement, force and pressure. These measurement systems can be custom-fit or modified to allow in vitro testing of hard and soft tissue under physiological conditions. This laboratory is also comprised of a fabrication shop that contains horizontal and vertical mills, metal lathes and cut-off saws. This allows custom-fixturing to be designed and fashioned in-house in an efficient and timely manner. By employing the resources in this lab, new devices or techniques have been developed such as a fixture that allows uniform pressurization of a proximal femur segment to simulate press-fit conditions of a femoral hip prosthesis, and an apparatus to allow the dynamic measurement of the moment arms of all twenty-four prime movers across the wrist at various angles of flexion/extension and radial/ulnar deviation. These devices and techniques were developed with the help of our Research Assistant III Vincent Kish, A.S.

Pictures of Electromechanical Lab. Click on the pictures to see larger size pictures.