Heterogeneous material-based biomedical product development

Abstract

With the rapid advance in material engineering, product design methodologies are experiencing dramatic paradigm shifts. The new trend is that designers cooperate with material scientists closely to tailor materials to achieve desirable properties, and the developed products can therefore exhibit superior performance than those using other available materials. A major characteristic of biomedical products is heterogeneous in terms of material composition and gradation, and heterogeneous materials (HE) which can mimic such the function have been increasingly used in biomedical product developed. In this paper, design methodologies and a software prototype system have been developed in the following three aspects: (i) A HE material design methodology for complex biomedical products; (ii) Designer-centric features to represent and visualize HE material-based biomedical product models; and (iii) Layer-based virtual manufacturing simulation to verify the fabrication feasibility and efficiency of HE material-based biomedical products. A case study is presented in the paper to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed methodologies and system. © Springer-Verlag London Limited 2009.