Design and Simulation of Prosthetic Running Blade Using Functionality Graded Materials

Abstract

Prostheses are artificial devices that replace some of the lost body parts due to for example, traffic accidents or wars. Running-specific prostheses are limbs designed to replicate the spring-like nature of biological legs during running. However, such device is expensive compared to its short life due to deterioration of the performance. Therefore, the main aim of the current study is to enhance the performance or in other words to develop a prosthesis that is very similar to the normal foot in characteristics. This can be attained by the proper design and optimizing the induced stress, strain energy, and deformation. Since the performance of engineering parts is depending mainly on the properties of the used materials, functionally graded materials (FGMs), as one class of the advanced materials, are considered as they have variable properties with the position. The considered prosthesis is divided into number of layers in order to optimize the material properties for improving the performance. The considered numbers of layers are 3, 5, and 10 layers. Also, finite element simulations using ANSYS are accomplished and it is found that the stress and strain energy can be reduced by 2.4% and 63.7%, respectively, when using FGMs. This contributes to the proper design of the prosthesis limb to be used for a higher load or decreasing the device weight. The current study positively contributes to reducing the functional disadvantages of the prosthetic foot compared to the human foot.