Research Article

International Journal of Advanced

Robotic Systems
July-August 2016: 1–9
A novel prosthetic knee joint with a ª The Author(s) 2016
DOI: 10.1177/1729881416658174
parallel spring and damping mechanism arx.sagepub.com

Huiqun Fu1, Xiufeng Zhang1, Xitai Wang1, Rong Yang1, Jian Li1,
Li Wang1, Ning Zhang1, Guanglin Li2, Tao Liu3, Bingfei Fan3,
and Yoshio Inoue4

Abstract
Prosthetic knee joint (PKJ) is an important apparatus for trans-femoral amputees to regain walking ability. This study has two
objectives: (1) to design a high performance and low-cost passive PKJ and (2) to evaluate the performance of the PKJ. In the
proposed PKJ design, a four-bar linkage was employed as the mechanical structure, and parallel spring and damper were used
as the two connecting rods of the four-bar linkage. With the parallel spring, the length of the connecting rod is variable and a
buffer flexion angle can be generated, which was consistent with that of the human knee joint. The damper was used to
regulate the swing speed of the shank. Through theoretical analysis, modeling, and simulation, key parameters of the
mechanical structure were optimized. Finally, experimental studies were conducted to test the performance of the PKJ,
including fatigue test and gait analysis. The results showed that the designed PKJ is reliable and the gait of PKJ is close to the
healthy subject. Moreover, it is comfortable and showed no adverse effects on the amputee during the walking experiment.

Keywords
Prosthesis, gait analysis, kinematics simulation, swing speed regulation, knee joint, four-bar linkage

Date received: 21 March 2016; accepted: 18 May 2016

Topic: Service Robotics

Topic Editor: Marco Ceccarelli
Associate Editor: Erwin-Christian Lovasz

Introduction
Walking is a fundamental daily activity for human beings.
For lower limb amputees, the loss of the walking ability
causes a lot of inconveniences in their daily life. Currently, 1
National Research Center for Rehabilitation Technical Aids, Beijing,
the most effective way to regain walking ability is to use China
2
prostheses. In all prosthetics components for a trans- ShenZhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of
femoral amputee, prosthetic knee joint (PKJ) is a critical Sciences, Beijing, China
3
State Key Laboratory of Fluid Power and Mechatronic Systems (Zhejiang
component that can affect the overall performance of walk- University), Hangzhou, China
ing. In past few decades, lots of work has been done to 4
Kochi University of Technology, Kochi, Japan
improve the PKJs. Generally, PKJs can be divided into
passive PKJ and active PKJ according to the power require- Corresponding authors:
ment. There are many active prosthesis proposed in the Xiufeng Zhang, National Research Center for Rehabilitation Technical
Aids, Beijing, China.
literature, such as geared active prosthesis,1 agonist– Email: zhangxiufeng@hit.edu.cn
antagonist active knee prosthesis,2 intelligent mechanical
Tao Liu, State Key Laboratory of Fluid Power and Mechatronic Systems
active PKJ with ball screw and servo motor,3 pneumatically (Zhejiang University), Hangzhou 310027, China.
powered knee and ankle joints,4 and a powered knee Email: liutao@zju.edu.cn

Creative Commons CC-BY: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
(http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without
further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/
open-access-at-sage).
2 International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems
prosthesis for volitional movement during non-weight-
bearing activities.5 For all active PKJs, motors or actuators
are the indispensable components. As a result, they must be
equipped with rechargeable batteries, which increases the
weight and volume and restricts the duration of operation
due to the battery capacity. Consequently, power issue
restricted the applications of active PKJs. For commercially
available PKJs from Otto Bock®, Ossur®, and Endolite®, the
majorities are passive PKJs, such as 3R55 from Otto Bock,6
seven-axial knee 1900 from ossur,7 and KX06 from Endo-
lite.8 Compared with active PKJs, the passive prostheses
often have a higher reliability and do not rely on batteries.
There are several mechanisms that can realize the func-
tion of PKJs, which can be divided into single-axis knee
joints and multi-axis knee joints. A single-axis prosthetic
knee using magnetorhelogical fluid damper was designed
in,9 and the knee joint angle could be controlled by inducing
the magnetic field during the stance phase. Another single-
axis manual lock knee was designed in.10 The manual lock
knee is appropriate for weak or unstable patients as well as
more active individuals who frequently walk on unstable
terrain, and the single-axis mechanism makes the knee rela-
tive simplicity and more economical. A biomechatronic
knee prosthesis was proposed in.11 It is an intelligent PKJ
based on single-axis mechanism. Although the single-axis
joint is simple and small size, the instantaneous center of
the single-axis knee joint is the center of the revolving
axle, which leads to unnatural gait and inconsistent with
the variational instantaneous center in human joint. In
addition, for the single revolving axle, this kind of knee
joint with lower stability and higher flexibility in stance
phase is more suitable for younger people with better
control capability. Of the existing mechanisms for
PKJs, the four-bar linkage is a basic and widely used
structure,12 and it has three main advantages.
(1) The position of the instantaneous center is variable
with the change of the knee angle between thigh and
shank, which is consistent with the human knee joint.
(2) The stance phase in one gait cycle is about 60%,13
in the stance phase of a four-bar linkage, the
instantaneous center of rotation (ICR) is positioned
posterior the trochanter–knee–ankle line and
above the mechanical center of rotation of the
mechanism,14 which means, better stability and
less required hip joint moment to keep the stability.
(3) When the four-bar linkage knee joint bending, the
effective length of the shank will become shorter
and the foot clearance is increased because of the
effect between the rotation center and the linkage.
This will keep the balance at the heel-strike phase
when the amputee is walking on an uneven ground
or slope area.15
The performance of the PKJ is indicated by its gait,
which should be close to the natural knee joint of the
BC: Thigh part
CD: Front connecting rod
Thigh AD: Shank part
AB: Rear connecting rod
C
B £
Rubber Mat
Parallel
Support Horizontal line
Spring
cylinder Damper
¢
A
D
Shank
Figure 1. Structure of the designed PKJ. PKJ: prosthetic knee
joint.
healthy people as much as possible, Therefore, an ideal
PKJ should be low cost, reliable, and has a natural gait.
Considering the advantages of the four-bar linkage struc-
ture, this article, focusing on the design of the mechanical
structure of a PKJ, developed a novel PKJ based on the
four-bar linkage structure, the major contribution of this
article lies in the following: first, with the parallel spring,
the length of the connecting rod is variable and a buffer
flexion angle can be generated, which was consistent with
that of the human knee joint. Secondly, the swing speed of
the shank could be regulated by the designed damper.
Methods
To design a mechanical PKJ, theoretical analysis and mod-
eling are required. In the following subsection, the design
process of the PKJ was first depicted. Then the structure of
the PKJ was introduced and the key components were ana-
lyzed in detail.
Theoretical analysis of the PKJ
Generally, the design of the four-bar linkage PKJ must
meet the following three conditions.
(1) The hip joint moment at the swing phase should be
as small as possible.
(2) The ankle joint angle curve at the swing phase
should be close to the curve of health subject as
much as possible.
(3) The ICR curve of the PKJ should be close to that of
healthy population.
Based on these requirements, this article designed a novel
knee joint and compared its stability and flexibility with the
biological knee joint. The principle of the designed PKJ is
shown in Figure 1. Parallel spring and damper are added to
Fu et al.
Table 1. Comparison of different four-bar linkage PKJs.
Prosthetic knee joint Features
Classical four-bar Basic function: provide with bionic relative
linkage PKJ16 ICR.
Customizable PKJ17 Light weight and easily customizable.
Relatively short lifespan.
ART-LEG Sport Designed for skiing, with a shock
knee18 absorber.
Less stability at stance phase.
PKJ with variable Capable of better adaptability to ground.
damper14 Shock may happen when walking.
Proposed PKJ With parallel spring and damper.
Capable of absorbing shock, better
stability, adjustable swing speed.
PKJ: prosthetic knee joint; ICR: instantaneous center of rotation.
the four-bar linkage which is composed of ABCD in Figure
1, the parallel spring consist of a rubber mat and a support
cylinder, the rubber mat is a compression spring and the
support cylinder can be regarded as a hydraulic spring,
AD rod is fixed with shank and BC rod is fixed with thigh,
namely shank part and thigh part, respectively. AB and CD
are two support rods fixed between shank and thigh called
rear connecting rod and front connecting rod, respectively.
The parallel spring is used as the posterior support rod of
knee joint to absorb the impulsive force at heel strike and
improve the stability of the stance phase of walking. The
damper is installed between BC and AD rods to regulate the
swing speed of the shank during swing phase of walking.
There are several PKJs using the four-bar mechanism in
the literature. A classical four-bar linkage PKJ is presented
in Amador et al.’s study,16 analysis was performed by the
standard ISO 10328, the authors focused on the mechanical
property, and no extra damper or other adjustable compo-
nent was designed. Thus, this PKJ has no special features
other than the basic functions, for instance, the swing speed
and ICR cannot be regulated. Hence, this PKJ could be less
comfortable for amputees in different walking scenarios.
Jianan Lu and Yonghua Chen designed a customizable PKJ
based on four-bar linkage,17 one connecting rod is made of
acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS)/nylon blend, glass
reinforced (nylon), which is hollow and regarded as a bal-
ance block, the hollow can be filled with a customizable
rubber damper. Since the PKJ is a long-term use apparatus,
ABS or nylon is not as strong as the commonly used alu-
minum alloy, this design would shorten the PKJ’s lifetime.
In the design in Demsar et al.’s study,18 shock absorber and
coil spring were added to the four-bar linkage, which pro-
vides better kinematics of the leg structure, However, the
stability of the support period when walking was not good
because the PKJs cannot lock at stance phase. A variable-
damping control prosthesis was found in Zhao et al.’s
study,14 the PKJ can be locked when its heel contacts with
ground, while due to the absence of elastomer, shock will
happen at heel strike. Compared with these four-bar linkage
3
Top Connector
Rotary Component
Top Frame
Cylinder Connector
Fork
C
Nuts
B Adjustable Sleeve
Rubber Mat
D
Connecting Pin
Support cylinder
A
Bottom Frame
Damping Cylinder
Foot Connector
Figure 2. Model of the designed PKJ with different components
having different colors. PKJ: prosthetic knee joint.
PKJs, features and advantages of the proposed PKJ are
summarized in Table 1.
Mechanical design of the PKJ
The model of the designed PKJ is shown in Figure 2. The
PKJ consists of top connector, rotary component, top frame,
cylinder connector, fork, nuts, adjustable sleeve, rubber mat,
connector pin, support cylinder, bottom frame, damping
cylinder, foot connector, and so on. The rubber mat is
installed in the middle of the AB rod to achieve the flexion
during walking. An additional spring is installed on the pis-
ton rod of the damping cylinder to assist the extension of the
joint. The damping cylinder regulates the swing speed of the
PKJ and makes a large rotary angle for the joint without
interfering the cylinder connector between the hinge points
B and D. Meanwhile, it makes the elastic rod AB easier to be
compressed during the heel-strike. Support cylinder func-
tions as a buffer for flexion and can be regarded as a hydrau-
lic spring. Top connector is connected with the thigh, while
foot connector is connected with the prosthetic shank. In
addition, the connections between top frame and bottom
frame, top frame and rotary component, rotary component
and fork, and support cylinder and bottom frame are all
implemented by rotation shaft and plastic bearings.
Working principle of the key components
Damping cylinder and support cylinder are the two critical
components in the designed PKJ. The first one is used to
4 International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems

(a) (b)

Spring Piston
Check valve
Piston
Valve
Elastomeric energy
Throttle storage unit
valve

Figure 3. (a) Working principle of the damping cylinder. (b) Working principle of the support cylinder.

regulate the swing speed of the shank and the other is used
to realize the knee buckling in the natural gait. The working
principle of the damping cylinder is shown in Figure 3(a),
which controls the telescopic speed of the cylinder to reg-
ulate the swing speed of the joint by adjusting the two
throttle valves. The damping cylinder is composed of some
critical components such as check valves, throttle valves,
piston, piston rod, spring, and so on. The spring is used to
resume after knee buckling.
The working principle of the support cylinder is shown
in Figure 3(b). The piston rod would rebound quickly after
being compressed from the top position by an elastomeric
energy storage unit, so that the buckling of the knee joint is
close to the natural gait. The support cylinder consists of
piston rod, valve, cylinder block, elastomeric unit, and so
on. Considering that the designed knee joint works under
the condition of high- or mid-speed, liquid is used as the
medium between the two cylinder blocks.

PKJ’s parameters optimization and gait

simulation
After the mechanism and the components are determined,
key parameters of the PKJ need to be determined through
analysis and simulation. First, the connecting rods length
was optimized and, secondly, gait analysis was performed
under the optimized parameters, which shows that the gait
of the PKJ is close to natural gait. Finally, finite element
analysis was carried out to verify the intensity of the PKJ.
Calculating the four connecting rods length of the PKJ
The rods length in the four-bar linkage structure has a great
effect on the position of the ICR, which affects the stability
of the PKJ directly. The blue curve shown in Figure 4 is the
ICR curve under the changes of the designed parameters.
The definition of each parameter is shown in Figure 1,
where a is defined as the angle between AD rod and hor-
izontal line and b indicates the angle between BC rod and
horizontal line. Their values are described as follows: AB ¼
75 mm; BC ¼ 26 mm; CD ¼ 88 mm; AD ¼ 40 mm; a ¼
7.32 , b ¼ 33.12 .
Figure 4. ICR curves under different rods length and different
angle, X-position, Y-position are the coordinates of ICR, note that
the standard line is overlapped by line of b þ 1 . ICR: instanta-
neous center of rotation.
To find the relationship between these parameters and
the position of the ICR, the above parameters were purpo-
sely changed. The red curve in Figure 4 is the ICR curve
when the length of the AB rod extended to 76 mm. The
other curves in Figure 4 are the ICR curve when adding 1
mm to the length of a specific rod. As shown in Figure 4,
adding the length of AB and CD rods has little effect on the
ICR curve. While adding the length of BC rod, the ICR is
obviously higher than the standard position and moves to
the left, which means higher stability19 but less flexibility.
Nevertheless, when adding the length of AD rod, the ICR
becomes much more lower and moves to the right, which
means poor stability but better flexibility. When adding the
angle b, the position of the ICR is not changed, which
means the same stability and flexibility as the standard
Fu et al. 5

Instantaneous Instantaneous O
O Instantaneous
O center center center

D D A D
A
A B
B C C
B C

Heel-strike Superposition Toe-off

Figure 5. Principles of the instantaneous center calculation.

knee joint. When adding the angle a, the ICR is lower than
Normal four-bar linkage PKJ
the standard which means better flexibility but poor stabi- Intended design
Bending angle (deg)
lity. Therefore, the changes of the length of BC and AD Biological knee
rods in the four-bar linkage have greater influence on the 0
ICR while the changes of other parameters have little influ-
ence, especially the change of the angle b. –20
By establishing constraints, this article calculated the
length of the four rods to make sure that the designed PKJ –40
has both proper stability and flexibility, and its instantaneous
center is posterior to the load line at the heel-strike phase and –60
prior to the load line at the toe-off phase, as shown in Figure 5. Stance phase Swing phase

Figure 6. Knee angle curve of normal four-bar linkage PKJ, bio-

Gait simulation for the PKJ
Any relative movement between two components can be
regarded as the instantaneous rotation around a fixed point
in the space. In the human body, both scroll and slide are
existed on the surface between two joints.20 During walking,
the length of thigh and shank changes and the speed of the ICR
of the PKJ is time varying. The gait curve of the designed PKJ
must be close to that of the healthy limb as much as possible.
As shown in Figure 6, a big peak has occurred around point D
which represents the maximum flexion of the knee joint.
There is also a small peak at point B which indicates that a
genuflex occurred during normal walking. This action guar-
antees people walking easier. However, the normal four-bar
linkage knee joint cannot realize the small peak in the stance
phase, as shown in Figure 6. This article, by installing a par-
allel spring on the rear connecting rod, makes its length vari-
able and generates a buffer flexion angle ranging from 10 to
15 with the four-linkage structure. This rod is compressed
only at the heel-strike phase. While in other phases like stance
phase, the rod would be under tension, and, as a result, it keeps
its original length without any deformation.
logical knee, and intended design. PKJ: prosthetic knee joint.
In order to implement the intended design shown in
Figure 6, SolidWorks (Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS
Corp., Waltham, Massachusetts, USA) was used to build
the model of the PKJ and ADAMS® (The MSC Software
Inc., Newport Beach, California, USA), which was used to
simulate the gait curve. The simulation was performed with
the following steps:
1. Import model from SOLIDWORKS to ADAMS
2. Establish constraints
3. Add spring, damper, and force
Add elasticity coefficient, damper coefficient, and pre-
load for the spring and damper element. The damper coeffi-
cient is 4 NS/mm and the preload is 50 N, while the
elasticity coefficient is 400 NS/mm and the preload is 50 N.
4. Simulation
5. Result outputting
6 International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems

190.0

185.0
Knee angle (deg)

180.0

175.0

170.0

165.0
0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9
Time (sec)

Figure 7. The simulation knee angle curve with ADAMS.

Rubber mat loading test

90
9.28mm Figure 9. The bending angle of the PKJ. PKJ: prosthetic knee
80 80 Kg joint.

70
either be measured in SolidWorks or in ADAMS by estab-
60
lishing an observing force with fixed thigh and shank.
Loading (Kg)

50

40 Finite element analysis of the PKJ’s block

30
20
10
0
0 1 2 3 4 5
Amount of compression (mm)
Figure 8. The analysis results of rubber mat.
In the environment of ADAMS, the angle curve of thigh
and shank cannot be directly output; therefore, indirect
method is employed. Select ‘‘Measure-Point’’ to Point in the
Menu Bar of Build, choose two markers in one part, and
then click y in the cylindrical coordinates to carry out the
measurement. With this method, the different angle–time
curves of thigh and shank with horizontal line can be drawn.
The knee angle curve is shown in Figure 7, which is drawn
based on the curve calculation function in ADAMS by sub-
tracting the corresponding points of the two curves.
To calculate the spring camber influence on the buffer
buckling angle of the knee joint, this article adds the cam-
ber of the spring by shortening the length of rear connecting
rod continuously to calculate the variation of the angle
between thigh and shank. The result of rubber mat under
an 80 kg load is shown in Figure 8. The compression of the
rubber mat is 9.28 mm, which is minor so that the maxi-
mum buckling angle of the knee joint can reach up to 15 .
Calculation of bending angle
As shown in Figure 9, the bending angle of PKJ can reach
up to 160 without any interference. The bending angle can
To analyze the deformation of the PKJ’s block statically, a
2500 N vertical force is exerted on the rotary component
plane. Figure 10(a) shows that the resultant displacement is
0.2593 mm. Figure 10(b) shows that the maximum stress is
1.1765  108 N/m2. The material of the block is 7075
6 7 8 9 10 aluminum alloy and that of the bolt bearing is alloy steel
with the minimum safety factor of 4.29. The analysis
results show that the stress and strain are within a safe
range.
Experiment
When the parameters were determined from calculation
and simulation, the prototype of the designed PKJ was
fabricated with aluminum alloy. The weight of the designed
PKJ is 791 g and the limit supporting weight is 100 kg. The
length is 224 mm and the maximum buckling angle can
reach to 15 with an elastic genuflex process. The maxi-
mum bending angle is 160 and the swing speed can be
adjusted. With the prototype, benchtop testing and amputee
walking experiments were conducted in this section.
Fatigue test
In order to verify the reliability of the designed PKJ, fatigue
test was conducted for the PKJ. Figure 11(a) shows the
tested knee joint in the fatigue test machine. The knee joint
has to complete the late stance under a load of 1200 N for
three million times. Furthermore, infrared flame scan
equipment is used to detect where the fatigue often
occurred, as shown in Figure 11(b), the brightest place of
the weakest point. Two designed PKJs were under test, no
Fu et al. 7

Figure 10. Results of finite element analysis. (a) The resultant displacement diagram. (b) The stress nephogram.

Figure 11. (a) Fatigue test workbench for the designed PKJ. (b) The infrared scan result after fatigue test, the temperature of the
weakest point is 31 C. PKJ: prosthetic knee joint.
damage was found after the fatigue test, and the tempera-
ture of the weakest point is 31 C, which is still within the
acceptable range. Consequently, the reliability of the
designed PKJ can satisfy the requirements.
Gait analysis
The performance of the proposed PKJ was evaluated in gait
experiments with an amputee (age 40, height 182 cm, and
weight 83 kg). The subject was wearing the designed PKJ
and had given informed consent to the investigations. Eight
markers were pasted on the healthy side and the prosthetic
leg, respectively. The gait curves of the amputee were
recorded by VICON (Vicon Motion Systems Ltd., Oxford,
UK) including six high-speed cameras. Figure 12 shows the
gait curve of the designed PKJ including two peaks which
are close to the gait of the healthy side. Figure 13 shows the
ground reaction force curve of the PKJ with respect to the
8 International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems
Figure 12. The gait curves of the designed PKJ, the horizontal
axis is the frame number at the sample frequency of 100 Hz. PKJ:
prosthetic knee joint.
Figure 13. The ground reaction force of the designed PKJ, the
horizontal axis is the frame number at the sample frequency of
1000 Hz. PKJ: prosthetic knee joint.
ground corresponding with the gait curve shown in Figure
12. Experimental results show that the gait curve of the
designed PKJ basically corresponds with the gait curve of
the healthy side and makes comfortable and portable sen-
sory with no adverse reactions during walking.
Conclusion
In this article, a four-bar linkage PKJ with a parallel spring
and damper was proposed, with the parallel spring, the
length of the connecting rod is variable, and a buffer flex-
ion angle can be generated. Thus this design can absorb the
impulsive force at the heel-strike phase and improve the
stability of the stance phase. The damper is used to regulate
the swing speed of the shank by regulating the two throttle
valves, so that the PKJ can satisfy the demands of various
amputees. Moreover, the influence of the four-bar linkage
parameters on the stability was analyzed and the para-
meters were optimized, kinematic simulation of the ICR
curve was conducted. The result shows that the consistency
of the designed PKJ and biological knee, which demon-
strates that the designed mechanism is feasible and reason-
able. Finally, fatigue test and clinical gait analysis have
been implemented. Experimental results show that no
design and quality problems were found in the fatigue test.
The wearing experiment results show that the gait curve is
close to that of the healthy leg, and the designed PKJ makes
comfortable and portable sensory with no adverse reactions
during walking.
In summary, the current PKJ design offers the following
advantages over available four-bar linkage PKJs.
1. With a parallel spring, the length of the rear con-
necting rod is variable, which generates a buffer
flexion angle to absorb the impulsive force; this
feature makes the designed PKJ more closer to bio-
logical knee.
2. The damper between thigh part and shank part is
used to regulate the swing speed of the shank, so
that the PKJ can satisfy the demands of various
amputees.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Xu Jianguang at National Research Center
for Rehabilitation Technical Aids for his valuable discussion with
the design and pertinent opinions for the article. We would also
like to thank Liu Ying at National Research Center for Rehabili-
tation Technical Aids for the data collecting and article polishing.
Finally, we would like to thank all the staff who participated in the
project at the National Research Center for Rehabilitation Tech-
nical Aids and for their support for the experiment.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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