Abstract

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