On the suitability of hexagonal honeycombs as stent geometries

It is a well-known fact that the mechanical properties of coronary stents are defined mainly by two components, the constituting material and the design pattern of the stent itself. The latter especially has attracted the interest of entrepreneurs and scientists alike with a plethora of patents being issued for numerous stent designs. Despite this widespread interest, the suitability of said designs are seldom studied. Accordingly, in this work we have investigated the properties of stent designs based on the hexagonal honeycomb geometry. Stent patterns based upon re-entrant, non re-entrant, and hybrid honeycomb geometries were studied with respect to their behaviour at extremely high strains using Finite Element Analysis. The data collected indicates that although the non re-entrant and hybrid geometries may be more suited to stent designs than the re-entrant geometry in terms of tolerance to high strains, none of these systems convey all the ideal properties desired in a stent, even if the former two have the potential of exhibiting some of them. (C) 2014 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim