FEA Case Studies
Advanced Stress Analysis of Medical Devices
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View a movie of bending and torquing a tube (2MB Quicktime movie) |
Predictive Engineering has been involved with the analysis of medical devices since 1995 with its first work on an endoscopic surgical stapler to current work on a bone marrow aspiration tool. In all cases, these projects were benchmarked against experimental results and shown to be in tight correlation.
Complex analysis demands were only part of the challenge for these projects since the medical industry also requires extensive documentation and quality assurance that the models are built per specification. Additionally, in several cases the clients required that an accuracy assessment be performed prior to the correlation with experimental results. It was an interesting twist that a prediction was required of the model's accuracy prior to the divulgement of the experimental data.
The four project summaries presented, represent a fraction of the total work done over the years but illustrates some of the most complex modeling challenges facing the medical industry with multi-component systems loaded to their failure point and that of elegant numerical simulations where stress waves are propagated through viscoelastic medium (acoustic radiation force impulse imaging).
Mechanical Engineering CONSULTING