SIMULIA's blog

Failure of pharmaceutical packaging incurs the risk of negative health outcomes and expensive product recalls. Pre-filled syringes represent a growing portion of the drug packaging market. During its working life, a syringe ex-periences stresses that may result in material damage. Specifically, the syringe barrel may develop microcracks that coalesce and propagate, causing the syringe to frac-ture and its contents to lose sterility. Abaqus/Standard offers the technologies necessary to include fracture and failure in the syringe design process.

In the design of hearing instruments it is important to achieve the highest possible gain without introducing feedback between the microphone and loudspeaker. With more gain, a larger hearing loss can be accommodated and a greater number of users benefit.

Maximizing gain while minimizing the possibility of feed-back requires an optimal choice of design parameters. In this Technology Brief, we outline how Abaqus/Standard and Isight can be combined in a process to optimize the vibro-acoustic characteristics of hearing instruments.

Biodegradable polymeric stents must provide mechanical support of the stenotic artery wall for up to several months while being subjected to cyclic loading that af-fects the degradation process. To understand the appli-cability and efficacy of biodegradable polymers, a hypere-lastic constitutive model is developed for materials under-going deformation-induced degradation. The model was implemented in Abaqus/Standard and applied to a com-monly used biodegradable polymer system, poly (L-lactic acid) (PLLA).

In the adaptive bone remodeling process, the density of bone tissue changes over time according to the load it sustains. Elevated loads produce increases in bone den-sity while reduced loads cause reduction of bone density. The long term success of an orthopedic implant can be better predicted by including this process in the design workflow. In this Technology Brief, we demonstrate the Abaqus/Standard implementation of one of the leading bone re-modeling algorithms.

Electroencephalography (EEG) is used to obtain informa-tion about the electrical activity in the brain and is rou-tinely used to diagnose neurological abnormalities. The inverse problem in EEG refers to the procedure of locat-ing electrical sources in the brain from the extracranial electrical field measured on the scalp. The solution of the inverse problem requires the forward calculation of the electric field for a given source location.