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On the use of non-linear transformations for the evaluation of anisotropic rotationally symmetric directional integrals. Application to the stress analysis in fibred soft tissues

Author

Summary, in English

Microsphere-based constitutive models are a helpful tool in the modelling of materials with a microstructure composed of contributing elements directionally arranged. This is the case, for instance, for fibred soft tissues. In these models, the macroscopic mechanical behaviour is obtained from the integration of the micro-structural contribution of each component (e.g. each fibre) over the surface of an underlying microsphere, which allows incorporating the mechanical features of the micro-constituents to the macroscopic response. The combination of this sort of models and the associated numerical techniques constitutes a powerful modelling tool for which an efficient integration scheme is required. In this regard, the unit sphere discretizations proposed by Bazant and Oh (ZAMM-J Appl Math Mech Z Angew Math Mech 1986; 66(1):37-49) have been used for the integration of the microscopic contributions in isotropic materials. Nevertheless, the inclusion of anisotropy has important implications with regard to the integration scheme, since very fine discretizations are needed to perform the integration accurately, causing the integration process to be very costly. In addition, the storage of internal variables at each integration direction of every integration point is required for constitutive models based on the use of internal variables at the micro-structural level, which renders this approach rather complex and memory demanding. In order to reduce the number of necessary integration directions, several non-linear transformations for the integration of rotationally symmetric functions over the Surface of the unit sphere are here presented. Their accuracy in the integration of the von Mises orientation distribution function is evaluated. Furthermore, a hyperelastic microsphere-based constitutive law for the modelling of soft biological tissues is used in order to check the accuracy and computational efficiency of the proposed transformations within a Finite Element context in inhomogeneous deformation problems. Simulation results show the suitability of the proposed methodology in order to accurately approximate the Value of the integrals within reasonable computational costs. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Department/s

Publishing year

2009

Language

English

Pages

474-504

Publication/Series

International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering

Volume

79

Issue

4

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

John Wiley & Sons Inc.

Topic

  • Mechanical Engineering

Keywords

  • spheres
  • integration of unit
  • anisotropy
  • non-linear transformation
  • microsphere
  • soft tissue
  • collagen fibres

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1097-0207