Analysis of Mechanical Behaviors of a Carbon/Epoxy Composite Artificial Foot Prosthesis

Analysis of Mechanical Behaviors of a Carbon/Epoxy Composite Artificial Foot Prosthesis

Nowadays, design and manufacture of prosthetic members, in order to gain desired performance, are very important and requires a complicated knowledge. In the case of artificial foot prosthesis, many biomechanical experimental articles have been published to demonstrate the ground reaction force distribution and center of pressure in foot, along a complete gait cycle. In this paper, by means of utilizing these published experimental results, the stress and displacement analyses were performed on a type of highly used carbon/epoxy composite artificial foot prosthesis, named Elite, that is one of the various models manufactured by Endolite Company. For this purpose, the geometry was modeled precisely, and then the analysis was performed for different types of critical load cases that occur in daily utilizations. Consequently, the final results were compared with the experimental results.