Combining soft and stiff components without losing toughness is typically very difficult with current synthetic tools.
High-performance biological structural materials such as bone and spider silk have evolved soft and stiff components to optimize the load transfer path.
For many semi-implicit or implicit Runge Kutta methods, the stiff components are represented inaccurately, and the methods are shown to be relatively inefficient.
The component mode synthesis method is combined with analytical solutions for determining the driving point conductance at joints between stiff and flexible members and for defining the properties of the damping elements which represent the flexible members when analyzing the stiff components.
After taking a few small (inner) steps with a simple, explicit method (such as direct forward Euler) to damp out the stiff components of the solution, the time derivative is estimated and used in an (outer) Runge Kutta method of arbitrary order.
This was expected, since BCP is the stiffest component in the assembly.
The method can be used in a large class of problems, especially for highly nonlinear ordinary differential equations (ODEs) without easily separating of stiff and non-stiff components, which is more general and efficient comparing with traditional semi-implicit SDC methods.
The use of a stiff femoral component may lead to calcar atrophy and cortical thinning, however modern titanium alloy femoral components appear to reduce the risk of this stress-shielding effect [ 5, 6].
The stiff CoCr component transferred compressive loads mainly in the pegs and cement pocket faces perpendicular to the applied force, away from the tibiofemoral contact site.
More particularly in the PLA-rich range, the thread-like dispersion of the stiff PA11 component plays the role of in situ fibrillar reinforcement of the soft PLA matrix.
