Development of a micro-scale soft gripper to be used in nerve repair surgery

Document Type : Original Article

Author

The British University in Egypt.

10.21608/iugrc.2022.302481

Abstract

Neurorrhaphy surgery is a nerve repair micro-surgery that is done by trimming damaged nerve and suturing the trimmed healthy one back to the nerve connected to it. The problem facing such surgery is the over gripping of the nerve by using the forceps in the surgery. The problem could be counteracted by replacing the rigid part, which in this case the forceps by an instrument which has soft parts. In this paper, a micro-scale trapezoid soft pneumatic gripper is designed to replace the forceps for the nerve repair application. Furthermore, Designing a more efficient fabrication process by implementing a mold made by SLA technology that will decrease the time of the soft gripper fabrication by half while ensuring high accuracy and quality of the soft gripper being manufactured, compared to the most used process for this application which is soft lithography. A finite element analysis is done in Abaqus to show the bending actuation of such gripper.

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