DYNAMIC MODELING AND ANALYSIS OF THE LOWER LIMB PROSTHESIS WITH FOUR-BAR LINKAGE PROSTHETIC KNEE$^{\bf 1)}$

Abstract

The four-bar linkage prosthetic knee has attracted widespread attention in the study of lower limb prosthesis because it shows a better bionic feature and a higher locomotive safety than the uniaxial joint prosthetic knee. Based on a real four-bar linkage prosthetic knee, this paper mainly studies the strongly nonlinear effects, e.g. the foot-ground interaction force and the unilateral constraint force of knee joint, on the gait of the lower limb prosthesis. For this purpose, firstly, the Kelvin-Voigt contact model is adopted to represent the effect of foot-ground contact force and the unilateral constraint force of the knee joint. The Coulomb model is employed to describe the effect of foot-ground friction force. Then, the Lagrange equations of the first kind are applied to model the dynamics of the prosthesis. Based on this model, the measured hip joint motion of an able-bodied testee is used as the driven signal and the gait characteristics analysis is conducted numerically. The numerical results reveal that if the stiffness of the hydraulic cylinder, which supports the motion of the prosthetic knee joint, is small, the strongly nonlinear effects may lead to the remarkable subharmonic response, which further results in the so-called gait inconformity. Further research shows that the subharmonic response can be avoided by lifting the hip joint, which provides a new insight into the compensatory mechanism such as lifting the hip for the amputee walking from the view of mechanics. In order to evaluate the consistence of the gaits between the prosthesis and the able-bodied testee, this paper further defines the correlation coefficient and analyzes the effects of the hydraulic cylinder's stiffness and damping on this coefficient. The results show that the correlation coefficient of the gaits can be better than 0.9 with proper stiffness and damping design. This discovery provides a solid foundation for further optimization of the four-bar linkage prosthesis.