Isogeometric shells for muscular thin film modeling
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Muscular thin films [1] are bio-medical devices developed to quantify the tissue-generated forces during contraction by assessing the deformations of artificial constructs composed of biological tissue and a substrate with known geometry and material properties, since direct measurements are extremely complex. To interpret these data, we propose [2] an isogeometric approach to model the deformation of active thin films using layered, nonlinear, Kirchhoff-Love shells. In this context, isogeometric formulations are employed to discretize the electrophysiological and mechanical sub-problems. Compared to full 3D models, which are the standard models in active film simulation, the proposed approach reduces the number of degrees of freedom required to conduct the simulations since only the displacements of the midsurface are explicitly computed. Numerical tests illustrate the capabilities of the active-stress-based approach to effectively simulate the contraction of thin films in both quasi-static and dynamic conditions.
