Finite element modeling of male leg and sportswear: contact pressure and clothing deformation

In clinical practice, fast assessment of contact pressure is usually calculated by Laplace's Law, which neither provides detailed surface geometry for soft materials of the leg, nor offers sufficient predictive power for designing high-performance sportswear. To bridge this gap, this paper describes a finite element (FE) model of sports tights that was developed with a detailed anatomic male leg model to predict the compression effects of high-performance sportswear. Non-linear elastic material was applied on the sportswear material to model the large deformation behavior. Experimental validation on athletes was performed. A reasonable agreement was found in the experimental validation. Suitable profiles were achieved along the height of the leg, in terms of both contact pressure and clothing deformation (true strain or logarithmic strain). The maximum contact pressure (2222 Pa) occurred on the posterior of the ankle, while the maximum principal true strain of the sports tights occurred on the edge of the upper thigh. This study indicates that the proposed FE model is useful for the assessment of contact pressure distribution in sportswear.