Poroelastic properties of bovine vertebral trabecular bone.

The theory of poroelasticity has been used to study bone mechanics without directly measuring poroelastic properties. In this study, we developed an experimental protocol and measured the poroelastic properties of bovine vertebral trabecular bone. Mean (+/-SD) values for drained shear modulus, drained Poisson's ratio, undrained Poisson's ratio, Skempton's coefficient, and permeability coefficient were, respectively, 90.85 (+/-59.59) MPa and 0.242 (+/-0.099), 0.399 (+/-0.083), 0.851 (+/-0.144), and 16.31 (+/-8.02) x 10(-8) m2/Pa/sec, respectively. The experimental protocol can be used generally for the measurement of poroelastic properties of bone when cylindrical specimens are available. Measured poroelastic properties can be used directly or converted to Biot's coefficient and modulus, without assuming the incompressibility of solid and fluid constituents, for the poroelastic modeling of bone.