Concept Design of Cardiovascular Stents Based on Load Identification

Abstract

The concept design is an important design phase for the cardiovascular stents. The topology optimization methods can be applied to the concept design of the cardiovascular stents. However, the interaction analysis between the stent and artery involves material nonlinearity, geometrical nonlinearity and boundary nonlinearity. The interaction analysis is not easy to be successful if these three types of nonlinearities are considered simultaneously. Therefore, the topology optimization process may be suspended if the nonlinear interaction analysis fails. The aim of this paper is to develop a design method to obtain the concept design of cardiovascular stents based on the load identification and homogenization method. A displacement control method is proposed to identify the design load of the cardiovascular stents. The identified design load is then applied to the stent and the nonlinear interaction analysis is replaced by the linear analysis. Further, the nonlinear analysis is completely avoided in the topology optimization process. The numerical results show that the proposed design method can obtain the legible concept design of cardiovascular stents.