Stress and Failure Analysis of Composite Prosthetic Leg

Abstract

Prosthesis is an artificial substitute for body parts such as limbs, eye, tooth, etc. Generally, the prosthesis is referred to as a fabricated substitute used to assist the damaged part of the body. The devices are made up of light materials like plastics, aluminium, and composites materials. The prosthetic technology is aimed to replicate the body part which is damaged irreversibly due to unfortunate incidents. The present work deals with creation of an optimized design for the prosthetic leg proposed by Saito et al. [2]. The material of prosthetic leg proposed here is made up of Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) composite laminate, having unidirectional and cross-ply stacking sequence, which is analyzed for static stress and failure loads. From the results, it is evident that, while a uni-directional laminate can withstand a failure load of 4910 N, a cross-ply laminate withstands 4282 N. Also, the individual ply versus stress is studied in this work.