Application of assembly and manufacturing technology in the field of biomedical engineering: Three dimensional solid modeling of prosthetic knee joint

Abstract

For transfemoral amputation the prosthetic knee joint is most critical component among all the modules of the prosthesis. This is because knee has to provide complete stability to the body whether the person is walking, standing or performing any other knee related movement. Even during the normal gait cycle it has to perform angular flexion and extension in swing phase and undergoes full extension at heel strike phase and hence keeps our gait pattern stable and balanced. Hence this paper focuses towards designing of single axis prosthetic knee joint which is great innovative step towards rehabilitation engineering. For the accurate and precised designing a reverse engineering has been applied and various metrology tools have been used to obtain different dimensions of each component of knee joint. Once the metrology has been done the designing was started by using computer aided designed (CAD) software Pro Engineer Wildfire 5.0. First of all, every single component has been designed separately and then all the components were assembled together resulting in a final assembly of prosthetic knee joint. After designing process, the simulation software PTC Simulate 1.0 has been used in order to perform stress analysis on reduced model of knee joint which determined the strength of prosthetic knee joint.