BEM-FEM of Coupling for Prosthetic Socket

Abstract

In this study, the investigating of the mechanical interaction between the residual limb and its prosthetic socket, and in computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing of prosthetic sockets is solving numerically by using FEM-BEM coupling approach.

This work tried to improve the deflection of the loading of Socket. The BEM techniques has been used to estimate a deflection at each distance for the main part of loading  that applied on Socket .In addition, a simplified stiffener has been added to optimize a moment of inertia of this main part thereby the deflection will be better , for this purpose a case study has been considered according to international standard for the Socket specification that investigated to illustrate the goal of this work

Moreover, a physical problem governed by a linear elliptic partial deferential equation but with a socket (where this paper approximate Socket to shell ) discontinuity in the domain cannot be efficiently solved using the traditional boundary element method. This paper also shows how the Laplace equation can be solved in an interior region containing shell discontinuities by recasting it as an integral equation known as a boundary and shell integral equation and applying collocation to derive a method termed the boundary and Socket element method. Direct and indirect methods are derived and applied to a test problem.  The results show that using stabilized method enables us to get stable and accurate numerical approximations consistent with the physical configuration of the problem over rough mesh by using ANSYS Workbench 14.0 ,AutoCAD and COMSOL 5.2.

Keywords: Finite element model; boundary element method; discontinuity; Socket