STUDY OF STATIC CONTACT BETWEEN THE HUMAN FINGER AND A RIGID SURFACE USING FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS

摘要

Nonlinear elastic models have been widely used to describe the mechanical behaviour of complex materials such as skin. The subject of skin modelling is reasonably new and of great importance to fields such as robotics and the development of skin-like materials to orthopaedics and prosthetics. The present article serves to add to the findings of previous authors and build a model that satisfies viscoelastic conditions of contact. Surface topography and shape have significant roles in how the contact behaves, and thus a 3D scan of a finger was realized and employed to describe the contact of a human finger with a rigid surface. The results show that the 3D model of the human finger is a better tool for approximating the contact phenomenon than the classic models because it can better mimic both the topography and overall shape and can be employed regardless of the availability of subjects for experiments in order to produce reliable results from simulations. It also can be used for forces and moments significantly higher than any human can withstand.