An Efficient Numerical Workflow for the Optimal Design of Stents
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The use of stents has proven to be successful in treating a wide range of vascular diseases. The renowned benefits of stenting have led to the production of over 100 different stent designs which are patented and currently marketed. Such devices are diversified with respect to materials, fabrication methods, and geometrical features, and typically present different properties, such as flexibility, biocompatibility, corrosion resistance. From a design viewpoint, a stent can be conceived as a cylindrical device whose external surface is obtained through the periodic repetition of a 2D microscopic geometry. For the proper functioning of the stent inside the vessel, the whole structure has to guarantee physical macroscopic requirements of interest, for instance on the mechanics and on the fluid-structure interaction properties. In this regard, a topology optimization problem, suitably completed with ad hoc constraints, can be beneficial to target specific characteristics to be included in the optimal design of the stent geometry. In this communication, we present an efficient numerical pipeline for the design of stent whose geometries can be customized according to required prescriptions. The proposed procedure consists of three main steps, namely the mathematical setup for the model formalization, the employment of microSIMPATY algorithm for the design of the topologically optimized unitary cell, and the subsequent computational fluid dynamics and mechanical simulations for the validation of the results.
