STATIC SIMULATION OF SURGICAL DRILL END-EFFECTOR WHEN GRIPPED BY FOAM

Often, companies invest significant research into determining the fatigue life of new products. Medtronic has requested an end-effector design for gripping a newly developed surgical drill during fatigue testing. Further, the end-effector must mimic grip stiffness of human hands. This work simulated the deflection experienced by the surgical drill while being gripped by the end-effector. To simulate the deflection, the Modulus of Elasticity of the foam was determined using a cantilevered beam experiment. Then, using this value and the density of the foam, a new material was created within the finite element analysis (FEA) software to correctly simulate the deflection. The outcome of this work was a comparison between the deflection experienced within the modeling software and experimental results. The model of the end-effector correctly simulated the deflection of the surgical drill within a reasonable range of error.