Fig. 5: Potential application of the irregular architected materials for orthopedic femur restoration.

a A healthy femur efficiently distributes compressive forces, resulting in relatively uniform compressive stress distribution (red arrows in the inset). b A fractured femur experiences concentrated compressive stress around the crack tip. c Comparison between the traditional and proposed methods for orthopedic femur restoration. The traditional method induces stress shielding, while the proposed method stimulates growth with shear stress (green arrows) under the transmitted pressure (blue arrows). d Simplified model of the proposed femur repair scheme with the applied displacement loading of U. Unit of target stresses, \(\overline{\tau }\): MPa. e The virtual growth process of the optimized 3D irregular architected materials. f Illustrative (left) and simulated (right) stress distribution. In the right panel, the x-axis represents the finite elements in the stress control regions, and the y-axis represents the values of the selected stress measure (shear stress here). g Comparison between the numerical and physical samples of optimized architected materials at varying scales.