Stress relaxation and creep behaviour of normal and carbon fibre reinforced acrylic bone cement.

Room temperature compression creep and stress relaxation behaviour of normal as well as carbon fibre reinforced bone cement was studied and their properties compared. It was observed that increased deformation due to creep in 24 h was about 70% of the initial strain (due to applied constant stress fo 10.5 MN/m2) for normal PMMA and this could be reduced to 45% of the initial strain by carbon fibre reinforcement. Surgical grade PMMA, when subjected to 1% constant strain, showed an average stress-relaxation by 24% in eight hours. Percentage of stress-relaxation was somewhat more for carbon fibre reinforced bone cement even though the level of stress was much higher compared to normal PMMA.