Digital and experimental synergies to design high-heeled shoes

Digital techniques are a strategic tool to design new commercial products, reducing time and waste. This is particularly relevant for shoe manufacturing and, in particular, for high-heeled shoes, for which a trade-off between comfort and attractiveness is difficult to achieve. This paper offers a new set of tools to design high-heeled shoes that exploits the synergies between modeling and experiments, aiming at predicting the comfort of such products, improving the manufacturing process by optimizing the design step. As a case study, two actual commercial 11-cm-heel shoe models, differentiated by the openness of the front side, were used to deploy the digital design procedure. A finite-element model was implemented by combining the outcomes from reverse engineering techniques, to reconstruct the foot and shoe topologies, and the experimental characterization of the materials used for the final shoe products. Pressure maps on the toes and the footbed were used as benchmarks for a comparison with experiments, made with commercial sensorized insoles. Non-uniform pressures for both shoe models were observed, with highest values for the closed-shaped specimen that presented peaks of ≈ 160 kPa on the footbed and ≈ 140 kPa on the external toes. The here presented digital approach has the potential to improve the design process that will not require the traditional fabrication of countless handicraft prototypes, saving time and the associated prototyping costs. Finally, although this work focused on a niche of the shoe market, this approach may be extended to other products, which customization has a key role in the manufacturing process. [Figure not available: see fulltext.].