ABSTRACT
Additive manufacturing is starting to be common practice for biomedical applications. It allows customized solutions for both patient specific treatments (for therapeutics) and patient specific instruments (for diagnosis or surgical procedures). However, the developed solutions must structurally resist to the mechanical solicitations. Thus, it is important to predict the structural behavior of the designed part/instrument before its production/manufacture. Today, the finite element method (FEM) is the most commonly used discretization technique for structural analysis. FEM’s fields of application ranges from large engineering structures to biomechanical analyses at the nanoscale. Thus, in this work, the finite element method (FEM) is used to perform an elasto-static analysis of a large scale stent produced by additive manufacturing - fused deposition modelling (FDM). The objective was to design a robust stent structure capable to withstand the mechanical solicitations at the assemblage phase. After several attempts, a structurally efficient standard modular solution was achieved. The solutions is also capable to be produced by FDM and then assembled respecting the patient’s physiological requirements. In the end, the developed solutions was printed by FDM for proof-of-concept.
