TY - CONF A1 - Klinger, Christian A1 - Bettge, Dirk A1 - Ell, Matthias T1 - Failure analysis on medical implants N2 - The application of implants e.g. for osteosynthesis or substitution of worn out joints is common practice since decades. Successes in surgery and orthopedics are highly dependent on the use of artificial parts for implanting into the human body. Over the years the number of surgical procedures and the number of different implants were growing rapidly. Implants, however, are exposed to complex mechanical, corrosive and tribological loads along with restriction in geometric dimension. While being essentially successful, the sheer number of cases leads to a rising number of implant failures. Such failures are painful for the affected patients and are very costly. The failure cases presented in this paper occurred from 1981 to 2016. The predominant failure mechanism of all kinds of implants is fatigue fracture. Fatigue cracks are initiated due to a whole bunch of reasons: Material defects and fabrication defects are rare events. The main factors are cyclic overload due to improper fitting with delayed bone healing, corrosion and unauthorized modification of the implant during surgery T2 - Int. Conf. on Engineering Failure Analysis 2018 CY - Budapest, Hungary DA - 08.07.2018 KW - Implant failures KW - Complex loading KW - Fatigue fracture PY - 2018 AN - OPUS4-50198 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -