Preliminary Stiffness-Driven Redesign of a Laminated Prosthetic Component Using Additive Manufacturing

Abstract

Three-dimensional printed polymers offer unprecedented advantages for prosthetic applications, namely in terms of affordability and customisation. This work thus investigates the possibility of designing an additively manufactured prosthetic foot using continuous fibre-reinforced polymers as an alternative to composite laminate ones. A numerical approach was thus proposed and validated as a possible design tool for additively manufactured composite feet. This approach was based on explicit separate simulations of the infill, aiming to capture its homogenised engineering constants. The approach was validated on simple sandwich specimens with a different infill geometry: stiffness predictions were within the experimental standard deviation for 3D simulations. Such an approach was thus applied to redesign a laminated component of a foot prosthesis inspired by a commercial one with new additive technology. The new component was about 83% thicker than the reference one, with 1.6 mm of glass fibre skins out of about 22 mm of the total thickness. Its stiffness was within 5% of the reference laminated one. Overall, this work showed how additive manufacturing could be used as a low-cost alternative to manufacturing affordable prosthetic feet.