Chremos Alexandros, Douglas Jack F, Basser Peter J, Horkay Ferenc
Section on Quantitative Imaging and Tissue Sciences, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892, USA.
Materials Science and Engineering Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD 20899, USA.
Gels. 2022 Nov 2;8(11):707. doi: 10.3390/gels8110707.
Articular cartilage is a composite hydrogel found in animal and human joints, which exhibits unique load-bearing properties that have been challenging to reproduce in synthetic materials and model in molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. We computationally investigate a composite hydrogel that mimics key functional properties of articular cartilage as a potential biomimetic model to investigate its unique load-bearing properties. Specifically, we find that the emergence of prestress in composite gels derives primarily from the stiffness of the polymer matrix and the asymmetry in the enthalpic interactions of the embedded particles and polymer matrix. Our MD simulations of the development of prestress agree qualitatively with osmotic pressure measurements observed in our model composite hydrogel material.
关节软骨是一种存在于动物和人类关节中的复合水凝胶，它具有独特的承重特性，这在合成材料中难以再现，在分子动力学（MD）模拟中也难以建模。我们通过计算研究一种模拟关节软骨关键功能特性的复合水凝胶，将其作为一种潜在的仿生模型来研究其独特的承重特性。具体而言，我们发现复合凝胶中预应力的出现主要源于聚合物基质的刚度以及嵌入颗粒与聚合物基质之间焓相互作用的不对称性。我们对预应力发展的MD模拟与在我们的模型复合水凝胶材料中观察到的渗透压测量结果在定性上是一致的。
