Many research endeavors involve strength testing of long bones from human or animal sources. Whole-bone four-point bending is appropriate for many applications, but recently diametral compression of short sections has been used to quantify local mechanical parameters [1, 2]. ASME standard WK88 covers strength testing of circular rings for brittle materials [3]. Testing of biologically-derived samples, however, entails a number of added complications, such as the non-circularity of bone sections, ambiguity of load orientation, thickness variation in a section, and size and shape variation between sections in a single sample. In order to quantify the effects of these confounding factors, finite element diametral compression models of a number of bone sections were compared with circular and elliptical sections.
