Zhang Gang, Qiu Hai, Elkhodary Khalil I, Tang Shan, Peng Dan
Hubei Provincial Key Laboratory of Chemical Equipment Intensification and Intrinsic Safety, Wuhan 430205, China.
School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Wuhan Institute of Technology, Wuhan 430200, China.
Gels. 2022 Aug 18;8(8):515. doi: 10.3390/gels8080515.
Hydrogels are nowadays widely used in various biomedical applications, and show great potential for the making of devices such as biosensors, drug- delivery vectors, carriers, or matrices for cell cultures in tissue engineering, etc. In these applications, due to the irregular complex surface of the human body or its organs/structures, the devices are often designed with a small thickness, and are required to be flexible when attached to biological surfaces. The devices will deform as driven by human motion and under external loading. In terms of mechanical modeling, most of these devices can be abstracted as shells. In this paper, we propose a mixed graph-finite element method (FEM) phase field approach to model the fracture of curved shells composed of hydrogels, for biomedical applications. We present herein examples for the fracture of a wearable biosensor, a membrane-coated drug, and a matrix for a cell culture, each made of a hydrogel. Used in combination with experimental material testing, our method opens a new pathway to the efficient modeling of fracture in biomedical devices with surfaces of arbitrary curvature, helping in the design of devices with tunable fracture properties.
如今，水凝胶在各种生物医学应用中被广泛使用，并在制造诸如生物传感器、药物递送载体、载体或组织工程中细胞培养的基质等装置方面显示出巨大潜力。在这些应用中，由于人体或其器官/结构的表面不规则且复杂，装置通常设计得很薄，并且在附着于生物表面时需要具有柔韧性。这些装置会在人体运动和外部载荷的驱动下发生变形。从力学建模的角度来看，这些装置中的大多数都可以抽象为壳体。在本文中，我们提出了一种混合图有限元法（FEM）相场方法，用于对由水凝胶组成的弯曲壳体的断裂进行建模，以用于生物医学应用。我们在此展示了由水凝胶制成的可穿戴生物传感器、膜包衣药物和细胞培养基质的断裂示例。与实验材料测试相结合使用，我们的方法为有效建模具有任意曲率表面的生物医学装置中的断裂开辟了一条新途径，有助于设计具有可调断裂特性的装置。
