Nitinol Stent Fatigue in a Peripheral Human Artery Subjected to Pulsatile and Articulation Loading

Nitinol self-expanding stents are used to treat peripheral occluded vessels such as the superficial femoral artery or the carotid. The complex vessel articulation requires a stent device that is flexible and kink resistant yet durable. The present study shows how the latest advances in commercially available engineering software tools permit engineering simulations of the many aspects of the Nitinol stent design and analysis. Two stent geometries are evaluated: a helical type stent design, and a more traditional straight strut, with multiple crowns design. The fatigue performance of the two stents is compared. The results show that advanced nonlinear finite element simulations and fatigue predictions of the Nitinol stent are possible today inside realistic simulated human arteries. The finite element analysis software used in this study is SimXpert, Marc, and Mentat (MSC Software, Santa Ana, CA).