Case Study: Archus Orthopedics achieves accelerated spinal implant development and accurate prediction of nonlinear spine motion with ANSYS Mechanical

Archus Orthopedics - Customer Case Study

Archus Orthopedics, developer of the Total Facet Arthroplasty System™ (TFAS®), faced the challenge of predicting the spine’s naturally nonlinear motion with an implanted prosthesis—a task traditionally done by slow, costly cadaveric testing that hindered rapid design iteration. To address this, Archus partnered with ANSYS and used ANSYS Mechanical (with ANSYS AI*Environment for meshing) to model the spine and implant behavior.

ANSYS implemented anisotropic hyperelastic material models in ANSYS Mechanical and used ANSYS AI*Environment to generate an all‑hexahedral mesh, enabling efficient, accurate simulation of implanted spine motion. The ANSYS solution produced strong correlation with physical test data, reduced the need for cadaveric testing, accelerated implant development, and allowed Archus to perform hundreds of design iterations in the same time it would take to run a single cadaveric test.