Many of the services BEAR provides can be applied towards the development of life-saving and life-enhancing medical devices. One example is life assesment for devices subject to repetitive loading like pacemaker leads and endo/exoprostheses. Also, BEAR engineers have experience dealing with anisotropic materials, such as those found in the body, and can model their response to thermomechanical events. Following are a few examples of some of the work BEAR engineers have done in this regard.

Silver Bullet - Electrosurgical Ball Electrode

Bear engineers worked on the development of a new electrosurgical ball electrode, which uses radiofrequency (RF) energy to fuse biological and other materials to tissue surfaces. This device was designed for use in pulmonary surgery to seal air leaks and in solid abdominal organ surgeries to provide hemostatic tamponade.

Angioplasty Balloons Angioplasty balloons are life-saving tools used to insert stents in failing blood vessels. BEAR engineers have worked on these amazing pieces of hardware in an effort to quanitify their mechanical properties. These data would then be used to better model angioplasty balloons using modern computer software. On this project BEAR engineers needed to design an experiment that provided meaningful information on very small specimens (1.5 mm to 5 mm in diameter). Pictured at right is a finite element contour plot used to validate the analysis methodology. Basically, the model shown was used to verify that the stresses in the base material would be less then those seen by the balloon. Through investigations like this one and others, BEAR Engineers were able to design an aparatus that satisfied the client's needs.

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Blood Vessel Connection Device BEAR has performed design review and mechanical analysis for numerous biomechanical devices.  One device was a blood vessel connection device.  The device was manufactured from an extremely ductile shape memory alloy.  The fabrication of this device was a complicated multistep process, and required detailed knowledge of the strains present in the component during each step.  BEAR performed a 3D dynamic finite element analysis and closed form solutions to this process.

Aortic Implant

Another anlaysis involved an aortic implant.  The metallic components of the implant were exposed to repeated loadings, and a full stress, fatigue, and fracture analysis was performed to demonstrate and determine the expected life of the the implant under various loading conditions.

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