The footwear industry is continually producing more technically engineered shoes,\udtherefore, it is necessary to improve existing laboratory footwear tests using simplistic rigid\udstamps to something more realistic. The aim of this article is to investigate the possibility of\udreverse engineering a standard commercially available component accurately enough to\udproduce constructive results in a finite-element analysis (FEA). A prosthetic foot was chosen\udas it is commercially available and is more representative of a real foot. Information on its\udgeometry and material properties were gathered using a non-destructive method. X-ray\udimages and three-dimensional laser scanning were used to capture the dimensions of the\udinternal and external geometries, whereas the vickers microhardness test and volume and\udmass calculations were used along with the Cambridge Engineering Selector software to identify\udmaterial properties. To validate the finite-element prosthetic foot, a vertical heel compression\udand a forefoot flexibility laboratory test were conducted and mimicked in an FEA software\udpackage. Good and fair agreements were found in the two tests, respectively. It is concluded\udthat a non-destructive approach to reverse engineer a standard component is an effective\udmethod of improving the realism of existing footwear tests both in reality and in finite-element\udsituations.
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