Fiber stabilization of bent cylinders, with an application to intervertebral disks.
Fibers cannot carry compression, and reinforcing fibers in a cylinder can only carry load if they are kept taut by the deformations of the cylinder. In the present study it is found that in pure bending, deformations that change the pitch, i.e., the angle between the fibers and the cross-sectional plane, towards 30 deg will slacken the fibers. With an initial pitch different than 30 deg, fibers in one half of the cross section will then be slackened by bending, and this half of the cylinder becomes unstable. Applied to the mechanics of the intervertebral disks, this may help explain mechanisms leading to nucleus prolapse.
D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging; D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena; D001827:Body Height; D002648:Child; D006801:Humans; D007403:Intervertebral Disc / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology*; D007405:Intervertebral Disc Displacement / Q000503:physiopathology; D013314:Stress, Mechanical