A consistent transversely-isotropic hyper-viscoelastic model: Finite element implementation and mechanical characterization of biological tissues

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

International Journal of Non Linear Mechanics

Abstract

Soft tissues like skeletal muscles, ligaments and tendons exhibit transversely-isotropic hyper-viscoelastic (VE) behavior. Simulating the mechanical response of such soft tissues under various types of loading scenario requires accurate constitutive models. Several models have been proposed towards this goal. Although these models successfully capture the deformations under different kinds of loadings, they offer limited description of the shear behaviour. The reason for this discrepancy is found to be the absence of few of the required strain invariants corresponding to the transversely-isotropic VE solids. We attempt in this work to develop a transversely-isotropic VE model that is capable of capturing the different shear responses by including the full set of strain invariants required in the Helmholtz free energy (HFE) function. The model is implemented in the finite element (FE) framework using the user-material subroutine (UMAT) facility of ABAQUS to demonstrate its responses under various states of deformations. The consistency of shear responses of the proposed model is verified by comparison with that of an existing model. The equilibrium part of the model is correlated with experimental findings to establish its utility in practically relevant cases of tissue biomechanics.

DOI

10.1016/j.ijnonlinmec.2024.104663

Publication Date

4-1-2024

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