Multiscale Mechanical Modelling of Medical Textile for Female Pelvic Organ Repair
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Pelvic organ prolapse repair meshes are porous knitted structures whose mechanical response is governed by monofilament/yarn diameter and material properties, knitting pattern, loop tightness and textile dimension. This work presents an architecture resolved micro-to-macro modelling approach for a PVDF monofilament-based warp-knitted medical textile. DynaMesh®-PRP specimens were experimentally characterized under uniaxial extension along the longitudinal and transverse textile directions. Five 20 × 60 mm specimens per orientation were tested under displacement-controlled uniaxial extension at 1%/s strain rate. The architecture was parameterized from the E18 single-needle-bed production data, and the three guide-bar topologies comprise GB1 pillar chains, GB2 interlocking loops, and GB3 long underlaps. The corresponding three-guide-bar warp-knitted architecture was reconstructed in TexMath and represented at the lower scale as a periodic network of one-dimensional yarn elements. Periodic virtual-loading problems and asymptotic homogenization/ dimension reduction were used to link the resolved yarn architecture to effective textile mechanics, while the lower-scale representation retained access to local yarn-level deformation fields. Linear and nonlinear structural predictions were compared with the averaged experimental force–displacement responses in both principal directions. At the common displacement of 15 mm, the experimental longitudinal-to-transverse force ratio was approximately 14, compared with approximately 17.6 for the linear prediction. The nonlinear formulation lowered the terminal force inaccuracy from about 29% to 16% in the longitudinal direction and from about 28% to 12% in the transverse direction. The results show that the experimentally observed directional mechanical hierarchy of the PVDF pelvic repair mesh can be reproduced by the explicitly architecture-resolved periodic textile model using the reconstructed knitted topology, without prescribing separate longitudinal and transverse material laws.
