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Tissue engineering aims to grow artificial tissues \emph{in vitro} to replace those in the body that have been damaged through age, trauma or disease. A recent approach to engineer artificial cartilage involves seeding cells within a…
In this paper, the analysis and homogenization of a poroelastic model for the hydro-mechanical response of fibre-reinforced hydrogels is considered. Here, the medium in question is considered to be a highly heterogeneous two-component media…
Biomimetic hydrogels based on natural polymers are a promising class of biomaterial, mimicking the natural extra-cellular matrix of biological tissues and providing cues for cell attachment, proliferation and differentiation. With a view to…
Soft living tissues like cartilage can be considered as biphasic materials comprised of a fibrous complex biopolymer network and a viscous background liquid. Here, we show by a combination of experiment and theoretical analysis that both…
We present theoretical and experimental studies of the elastic response of fibrous networks subjected to uniaxial strain. Uniaxial compression or extension is applied to extracellular networks of fibrin and collagen using a shear rheometer…
Internally generated active stresses drive soft materials into architectures inaccessible to thermal self-assembly. We use a microtubule-based active fluid to assemble and irreversibly restructure actin-fascin networks. Subsequently, we…
Hydrogels of semiflexible biopolymers such as collagen have been shown to contract axially under shear strain, in contrast to the axial dilation observed for most elastic materials. Recent work has shown that this behavior can be understood…
In this paper we study the elastic response of synthetic hydrogels to an applied shear stress. The hydrogels studied here have previously been shown to mimic the behaviour of biopolymer networks when they are sufficiently far above the gel…
Many biological materials such as cervical mucus and collagen gel possess a fibrous micro-structure. This micro-structure affects the emergent mechanical properties of the material, and hence the functional behaviour of the system. We…
It is widely known that hydrogels, a class of soft materials made of a polymer chain network, are prone to fatigue failure. To understand the underlying mechanism, here we simulate polymer scission and fatigue initiation in the vicinity of…
We propose a predictive model for the mechanical behavior of biodegradable polymers of interest for biomedical applications. Starting from a detailed description of the network behavior of the copolymer material, taking care of bonds…
Evaluating the mechanical response of fiber-reinforced composites can be extremely time consuming and expensive. Machine learning (ML) techniques offer a means for faster predictions via models trained on existing input-output pairs and…
Hydrogels are biphasic, swollen polymer networks where elastic deformation is coupled to nanoscale fluid flow. As a consequence, hydrogels can withstand large strains and exhibit nonlinear, hyperelastic properties. For low-modulus hydrogel…
We study the micromechanics of collagen-I gel with the goal of bridging the gap between theory and experiment in the study of biopolymer networks. Three-dimensional images of fluorescently labeled collagen are obtained by confocal…
This work considers simultaneous homogenization dimension reduction of a poroelastic model for thin fiber-reinforced hydrogels. The analysed medium is defined as a two-component system consisting of a continuous fiber framework with…
The effective macroscopic response of nonlinear elastomeric inhomogeneous materials is of great interest in many applications including nonlinear composite materials and soft biological tissues. The interest of the present work is…
Composite materials often exhibit mechanical anisotropy owing to the material properties or geometrical configurations of the microstructure. This makes their inverse design a two-fold problem. First, we must learn the type and orientation…
A three-dimensional multi-scale computational homogenisation framework is developed for the prediction of nonlinear micro/meso-mechanical response of the fibre-reinforced polymer (FRP) composites. Two dominant damage mechanisms, i.e. matrix…
Hydrogels are increasingly recognized as a versatile platform for applications spanning from tissue engineering to soft robotics or flexible electronics. Recent efforts have focused on enhancing and tailoring their mechanical performance to…
Extensibility is beyond the paradigm of classical soft glassy materials, and more broadly, yield-stress fluids. Recently, model yield-stress fluids with significant extensibility have been designed by adding polymeric phases to classically…