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Abstract The hip joint is one of the most important human joints that indicates some serious physical problems for human beings. Therefore, it should underlic a through study w. r. t its tribological behavior. The present research work aims at improving the tribological performance of the human artificial hip joint prostheses to help in producing reliable ones based on constructed design charts.. An elastohydrodynamic model of the hip joint is proposed and a numerical solution of the governing equations using finite difference technique is used to predict the elastohydrodynamic behavior of such joint. In addition, an experimental abrasive wear test for UHMWPE material is performed. A parametric study has been conducted and results have shown that within the test range a thicker cup leads to better tribological performance. Increasing the femoral head radius results in a reduction in the non-dimensional maximum pressure and decreasing the minimum non-dimensional film thickness: The increase in radial clearance increases the maximum non-dimensional pressure and the minimum film thickness. Cups with higher elastic modulus increase the maximum dimensional pressure and decrease the minimum non- dimensional film. Also, an increase in the angular velocity doesn’t affect the tribological behavior considerably The experimental results show that the accumulated abrasive wear (by weight) increases in a non-linear manner with the increase in the applied normal load, sliding velocity and sliding time. For the same number of sliding cycles, the accumulated abrasive wear remains nearly constant and is not affected by the increase in the sliding velocity for almost all the test range. |