Efficient time-stepping for the evolution equations of damage-induced growth and remodelling in soft biological tissues

Abstract

The constrained mixture method is a powerful instrument to model soft biological tissues, in particular — their growth and remodelling (G&R) behaviour. Its clear drawback lays in the increase of governing equations which corresponds to the increase of material constituents. In the current paper we scrutinise a particular G&R model, that is based on the detailed description of material’s chemo-mechano-biological state, caused by excessive load associated with collagen fibres’ unfolding. The model consist of many interacting evolution equations, solving of which takes most of computational time during applied simulations. Two qualitative model assumptions are made to improve its capabilities. Moreover, several iteration-free numerical schemes are introduced addressing the integration of evolution equations. We show that the numerical performance of the model drastically improves with the proposed schemes, while no compromises with respect to robustness or accuracy of the simulation are made.