Design and Optimization of Medical Equipment

Ever-advancing research in the field of medical technology, extra-tight margins for design safety, and strict regulations, lead to a very high level of complexity in the design of medical equipment, with typical goals such as increasing efficiency, reducing invasiveness, and minimizing adverse effects. Modern simulation tools allow the designers a good insight into the performance measures of interest, but can be challenging and time-consuming to employ on a wider scale, especially when performing parameter studies. A proven way to overcome these challenges is automated design exploration and optimization.

Optimization and automated design exploration augment the development process by leading to better and optimized designs, shortening development times and reducing design cycles, as well as increasing the knowledge about the product’s behavior, i.e., the influence of various parameters on its performance, early in the design process, when the freedom for making decisions is largest.

Apart from the aforementioned simulation tools, two crucial components are needed to achieve the desired process automation: a driver of the optimization process with appropriate systematic variation and optimization strategies, and a suitable CAD tool that can reliably produce the different geometry variants that should be analyzed.

CAESES® is a comprehensive software solution for exploring and optimizing complex medical equipment. CAESES® bridges the gap between traditional CAD and simulation. It provides intelligent geometry models for robust shape variation, and CFD automation to conduct design explorations and optimization. In particular, the focus of CAESES® is the simulation-ready and variable CAD.

Why Would I Need an Additional CAD System?

In our experience, the primary bottleneck in setting up and running an automated design exploration or optimization process is related to the handling of the geometry:

• Geometry variation with traditional CAD systems is often tedious or prone to failure, i.e., some or even many of the variants fail to regenerate when changing parameter values.
• Too many parameters make optimization inefficient.
• It is difficult to consider, or even automatically fulfill, given constraints.
• The quality of the CAD model might not be suitable for simulation (e.g., w.r.t. watertightness, level of detail).

For the most part, CAESES® is a highly specialized CAD system that specifically tackles these problems. It is focused on parametric modeling and variation of complex geometries for design studies and optimization. It provides efficient parameterization methods that offer a high degree of flexibility while using less parameters, comprehensive capabilities for integrating constraints, and simulation-ready exports that require no manual processing.

Medical Design Capabilities

CAESES® comes with an extensive set of capabilities to support the design and optimization of medical equipment:

• Comprehensive parametric modeling of arbitrary geometries based on fully user-defined parameterizations.
• Alternatively, flexible and powerful morphing capabilities for quick but controlled modification of imported geometries (discrete or NURBS based).
• Robust variation with no failed variants.
• Full consideration of constraints, e.g., due to manufacturing and packaging reasons.
• Geometry exports in several different formats suitable for your CFD/meshing tools. Most of the formats support patch naming, so that downstream tools can correctly identify surface patches for the assignment of individual mesh settings or boundary conditions.
• Generic interface to easily connect CAESES® to external simulation and calculation tools (often CFD, but also other disciplines such as structural analysis.).
• Fully-featured optimization environment with a wide selection of DoE and optimization strategies, as well as data management and post-processing capabilities.
• Full scriptability, to easily integrate CAESES® in third-party optimizers or custom workflows.

Medical Applications

Typical applications for CAESES® in the design of medical equipment are:

• Circulatory support systems, like ventricular assist devices (VADs)
• Cardiopulmonary bypass machines
• Artificial hearts
• Medical implants, like artificial heart valves or stents
• Drug delivery systems
• Ventilators
• Oxygen masks
• Inhalers
• Microfluidics, like lab-on-a-chip
• Airflow delivery systems for operating rooms

Who Uses CAESES?

Leading players in the sector, such as medical equipment manufacturers, research labs, and academic institutions use CAESES® for the design and optimization of medical equipment.

Case Studies and Blog Posts for Medical Applications

Try it Yourself

Please do not hesitate to get in touch with us if you have questions in the context of your specific application. We look forward to discussing it together with you!

1. Download CAESES®, register for a trial license, and open the intake port sample file that comes with the software.

2. Create a geometry from scratch and set up an optimization workflow following the tutorials that you can find in CAESES®.

Questions ?

Please do not hesitate to get in touch with us if you have questions in the context of your specific application. We look forward to discussing it together with you!