In-situ investigation of stress conditions during expansion of bare metal stents and PLLA-coated stents using the XRD sin(2) psi-technique

摘要

Drug eluting stents (DES) consist of platform, coating and drug. The platform often is a balloon-expandable bare metal stent made of the CoCr alloy L-605 or stainless steel 316 L. The function of the coating, typically a permanent polymer, is to hold and release the drug, which should improve therapeutic outcome. Before implantation, DES are compressed (crimped) to allow implantation in the human body. During implantation, DES are expanded by balloon inflation. Crimping, as well as expansion, causes high stresses and high strains locally in the DES struts, as well as in the polymer coating. These stresses and strains are important design criteria of DES. Usually, they are calculated numerically by finite element analysis (FEA), but experimental results for validation are hardly available.