Computational analysis of designing an improved coronary stents of biodegradable Poly-lactic Acid (PLA)

ABSTRACT

The complications arising after the transplantation of conventional stents put atherosclerotic cardiovascular patients at high risk. Biodegradable poly-lactic acid (PLA) stents provide practical solutions for diseased vessels (atherosclerotic) and avoid the side complications of vessels and their incompatibility with permanent stents in the long term. PLA is a biodegradable and reliable material that is used for biodegradable stents designs to maintain natural mechanical behaviour in blood vessels. In this study, we suggest a new cross section ‘circular and elliptic’ that are proposed based on basic square shape cross section to study the mechanical behaviour of stents under pulsatile blood pressure in the blood vessels in order to choose the best shape to allow the biodegradability of Absorb stents with Poly-lactic Acid (PLA) material by numerical fatigue study. Three types of cross-sections stents struts have been analysed to compare their mechanical properties in terms of stress, strain, fatigue damage and life cycle. The numerical results obtained from the finite element analysis (FEA) method demonstrate that the elliptical and circular stents design has better efficiency in terms of stress and strain (16.66–33.33%) and fatigue damage (62.4–86.07%) compared to the square design.

KEYWORDS:

• Polymeric Stent
• poly-lactic acid (PLA)
• finite element analysis
• stress
• strain
• fatigue analysis
• design optimisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article or its supplementary materials.