FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF STENT WITH PERIODIC STRUCTURE

Coronary stents have revolutionized the procedure of treating a blocked coronary. A stent is a tube placed at the stenos to keep the arteries open during the treatment process. Balloon-expandable stents are inflated uniformly along with the balloon’s expansion until the plastic deformation of the stent occurs. In this paper,the selected micro periodic structure named the representative model is formulated and the inflation of the stent is analyzed by using finite element method with application of the corresponding periodic boundary conditions which specify differences of displacements on the two opposite boundary surfaces. The calculations of the whole stent are presented through the post-process procedure on the basis of the representative model calculation. The results include two aspects：one is the stress and deformation prediction,which plays a significant role in the design and analysis of long-term effects after the implantation procedure;the other result is the relationship between the internal pressure and the expanded diameter of the stent,which can give surgeons important reference. The simulation is performed by ABAQUS/Explicit package. The proposed boundary conditions and approach require much less computational efforts than analyzing the whole stent model to achieve the same accuracy.