Blog posts

For clinicians and medical device manufacturers, in-vitro and in-vivo testing of the knee are important methods for evaluating treatment techniques. However, numerical models that can provide much of the same information will become of more service and are a new focus of the modeling community. A continued effort has centered on specimen-specific anatomical and functional models, in terms of both geometry and mechanical properties of the tissue constituents.

A variety of polymers are used extensively for both medical applications and consumer products. Most of these polymers exhibit time-dependant behavior which varies significantly with environmental conditions. Injection molding technologies generally offer application design freedom and options for several functions build into each component. Meanwhile analysts are often faced with the difficulties of predicting the response of the final product.

Numerical methods applicable to the tibia bone and soft tissue biomechanics of an ACL reconstructed knee are presented in this paper. The aim is to achieve a better understanding  of the mechanics of an ACL reconstructed knee. The paper describes the methodology applied in the development of an anatomically detailed three-dimensional ACL reconstructed knee model for finite element analysis from medical image data obtained from a CT scan. Density segmentation techniques are used to geometrically define the knee bone structure and the encapsulated soft tissues configuration.

As the maximum speed of bullet trains continues to increase, overheating and thermal deformation/stress on brake systems are going to be critical for emergency stops. Precise prediction of the maximum temperature is needed for the design of brake systems, especially for both discs and linings, where how to handle the high speed spinning of discs is the point of the heat/structure coupled analyses. Abaqus provides couple of potential methods but each one had critical shortcomings.

Electrically operated high temperature furnaces and reactors are used in many industrial

manufacturing processes such as sintering or single crystal growth in order to allow for the

required process conditions. In view of their outstanding characteristics refractory metals are

Since the 1946 issuance of the ASTM bearing steel specification, A295, the research and

development of bearing steels has resulted in substantially improved fatigue and wear

Today manufacturing companies are more and more often characterized by a growing product

and processes complexity. Projects needs the participation of a pool of companies that have to

collaborate in a multidisciplinary and integrated way following a defined PLM strategy.

These challenges are meant to introduce a new way of working, based on innovation and

global collaboration, both internally among different disciplines and externally between

operations, administration, and maintenance and its suppliers. The development engineering

Carbon-fiber-reinforced plastics (CFRP) are being used for highly loaded lightweight structural components for many years. Up to now mostly insufficient two-dimensional classical failure criterions, which are embedded into FE-software like Tsai-Wu, Hill, etc. have been used for the dimensioning of composites. To achieve better predictions of the three-dimensional complex composite failure behavior newer, so-called action-plane based failure criterions have been developed, e.g.: PUCK, JELTSCH-FRICKER or LaRC04.

Each year companies spend millions of dollars for developing new products with high quality and reliability. Highly reliable products require longer test times to verify, and usually takes a few iteration of design-test-fix cycle. Development time can be minimized by (1) doing accelerated testing (ALT) and (2) reducing the design-test-fix cycle by developing methods to predict and test for reliability in simulation environment. Finite element modeling and analysis provides an excellent alternative in evaluating designs to improve on reliability.

Paper transport is one of the areas under media handling methods where papers are transported by rollers through different path ways. The challenge in media handling is to transport the paper smoothly with out jam or in-plane deviation (paper skew). The smooth flow of paper is influenced by grade of paper, complexity of flow path, roller speed, roller pre-loads and significantly the roller material. It is also costly and difficult to develop a physical flow path testing.