Abstract
When designing the shape of a product that is comfortable to grasp, a quantitative evaluation that can be performed in a short-time and at low-cost is required. In this study, we developed a hand finite element model and a grasping simulation method to simulate the grasping motion of a volunteer and to reproduce the contact pressure distribution on the palm during grasping experiment against a cylindrical object. Furthermore, a parametric study was also conducted to investigate the effect of several factors on the contact pressure distribution. It was found that the contact pressure tends to increase overall with the decrease of the hand size. This trend was similar to the case, where the contact pressure increases with the increase of the diameter of the cylindrical object. Furthermore, large contact pressure concentration was confirmed when the Young's modulus of the cylindrical object increased. On the other hand, the influence of the friction coefficient on the contact pressure distribution was relatively small compared to other factors.
