Designing Optimum Oil Thickness in Artificial Human Knee Joint by Simulated Annealing

In human knee joints, synovial fluid film covers the surface of synovium and cartilage within the joint space. Synovial joints acts as bearing in mechanical system. Although the artificial human joints differ from most mechanical bearings in their nature, they have been modeled and analyzed in terms of hydrodynamic bearing of engineering. In this study, nature inspired an algorithm, the simulated annealing (SA), is used to find minimum fluid film thickness in artificial human knee joints. It is important to optimize the film thickness of the bearing in terms of successful operation and lifetime of the implant in terms of friction and wear. The problem is complex and a time consuming process due to design variables and constraints imposed on the objective function. It is demonstrated that the SA performed and obtained convergence reliability on the optimum point.