Research

Multiscale prediction of friction and lubrication in total hip replacement bearings.

Placeholder copy — edit freely. The structure below is a starting point.

the problem

Friction across scales

Lubrication in a ball-in-socket bearing is set both by the gross geometry and kinematics of the bearing and by physics that lives at the scale of surface texture and the thin lubricant film. Resolving everything at once is prohibitive, so the work centres on a multiscale method: capturing the microscale behaviour cheaply and feeding its effect back into a macroscale model.

approach

Heterogeneous Multiscale Method

The macro model solves the governing lubrication equations on a coarse mesh. At each point where microscale information is needed, a small representative cell is solved and homogenised to give effective coefficients — which then correct the macro solve. The methods section works this idea through on a clean 1D elliptic model problem before it appears in the full elastohydrodynamic setting.

tools

Tools

FEniCS / PETSc for the finite-element solves, with HPC scaling for the parameter studies. Notebooks here are self-contained demonstrations rather than the production solver.

publications

Publications

• Manuscript in preparation