Multiscale Mechanical Modelling of Medical Textile for Female Pelvic Organ Repair
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Pelvic organ prolapse (POP) is typically treated with transvaginal mesh surgery using knitted textiles made with monofilaments of polypropylene (PP), polyethene terephthalate (PET), or polyvinylidene difluoride (PVDF). However, complications including mesh erosion through the vaginal wall, bleeding, pain and dyspareunia remain high, arising from mesh stiffness, pore collapse, and inflammation. Such meshes are porous and exhibit highly nonlinear, anisotropic mechanics. Multiscale modelling of yarn-to-fabric mechanics is critical to optimize mesh performance and clinical safety. This study’s goal is to develop a multiscale finite element (FE) framework for a PVDF based warp-knitted textile for POP repair, capturing yarn-scale loop mechanics and their upscaling to fabric-level. A two-scale FE framework will be implemented using LS-DYNA. Yarn mechanics, including frictional contact, will be explicitly modelled within a representative unit cell and homogenized into a fabric-scale constitutive response. Mechanical characterisation includes uniaxial ramp and biaxial cyclic tests performed along different orientations of the textile. Material parameters are identified through inverse analysis by fitting simulated to experimental pore strain-fields. An open-source tool MeshPoreTracker is used to track pore centre displacements and compute full-field Green–Lagrange strain. The proposed framework couples multiscale modelling with pore-scale strain-field validation, linking yarn mechanics to fabric behaviour to enable bridging textile mechanics with surgical complications. Preliminary uniaxial tests show the textile reached 90 N at 15 mm deformation in the longitudinal direction, with stiffness approximately 10 and 25 times higher than in the transverse and diagonal directions, indicating anisotropy. Under biaxial cyclic loading, the mesh shows transverse hysteresis with residual strain up to 10% post-unloading. The multiscale model aims at replicating the textile’s nonlinear behaviour and anisotropic response. The findings support optimising the knit pattern and pore size to enhance textile performance and safety. This study will further contribute to predicting textile-tissue interactions under physiological loading after the repair of female POP.
