Effect of Decalcification on Fracture Strength in Chicken Bones

Class: BE210
Group: 102_A5

Members:

Wee Siong Goh

Jonathan Lee

Vincent Cina

Tim Bakke

Date: April 2006

Powerpoint Presentation
Full Text

The main objective of this experiment is to understand how calcium loss from bone affects bone fracture strength, determined as the force in Newtons at which the bone breaks when subjected to the 3-point bending jig of the Instron machine.

The central hypothesis is that the relationship between bone fracture strength and mass of calcium extracted per bone mass is linearly decreasing as evidenced by a plot of average fracture strength (N) versus average mass ratio of calcium extracted to bone (g/g) yielding a linear fit line with a negative slope and R² value exceeding 0.95.