FEM ANALYSIS OF CORONARY STENT DEPLOYMENT

Abstract

As stent technology moves forward, there’s a growing need for fast and accurate stent deployment visualizations. To that end, the Finite Element Method was used for quasi-static analysis of a balloon expandable stent. A model was created, which includes a stent, balloon, artery and a plaque. In order to achieve faster computation, various approximations have been included, especially considering the balloon, artery and plaque. Some non-linear problems are assessed, like the contact between different parts of the model. Arterial tissue and plaque are modeled as isotropic hyperelastic materials. The balloon was specially designed and discretized to avoid the computational difficulties during inflation. Thanks to the complexity of this model, useful results can be obtained in a reasonable time frame. The software used for FEM analysis was ABAQUS.