It's not easy for medical manufacturers to ensure their medical devices are reliable. For example, upon examination, seemingly identical lead wires in a random sample were found to have up to a 10X variation in durability. How much of this variation is caused by the manufacturing process and how much by differences in material or even residual stresses induced when the wire is spooled? Trial-and-error testing simply can't begin to solve such problems.

Typically, a company's product knowledge comes from R&D, supplemented by previous experience, anecdotal evidence, and conventional wisdom. However, this just describes what happened in the past — not what is going to happen in the future. Here is where a simulation service called Virtual Life Management (VLM) can help. It models variability by using a combination of material science, probabilistic methods, and loading parameters to predict the behavior of materials in the physical world. Unlike FEA models that only measure where stress happens, VLM simulates how materials respond to stress at the microstructural level. This provides a more accurate picture of how stress moves through the microstructure and causes damage. Once a lead-wire model is built, for instance, engineers can interrogate it in ways simply not possible or practical with physical testing. For a more detailed explanation of the technology

Vextec Corp, 750 Old Hickory Blvd, Brentwood, TN 37027, (877) 776-2878, vextec.com