The Challenge
Service life testing of spinal constructs is critical as fatigue failure is more common than catastrophic failure. During normal patient activity, spinal constructs can be subjected to high in vivo loading, which may result in catastrophic failure. Cyclic testing is performed in order to evaluate the number of cycles it takes for fatigue failure to occur. Loading is typically applied with a constant-amplitude load-controlled sinusoidal waveform running in excess of five million cycles. Simple static testing is also performed to evaluate the load required to result in spinal fracture.
