ICCM Conferences, The 14th International Conference of Computational Methods (ICCM2023)

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Mechanical modeling of hydrogel composites with different fiber volume fractions in multiple orientations
Xiangchuan Nian, Qingsheng Yang

Last modified: 2023-05-26

Abstract


Fiber-reinforced hydrogel materials have attracted significant attention due to their existence widely in both biological tissues and synthetic hydrogel composites. The fibers are distributed in the hydrogel matrix with varying orientations and with different volume fractions in multiple orientations. This paper develops a continuum constitutive model of hydrogel composites, which considers the aforementioned fiber distribution based on a fiber-reinforced multi-field coupled thermodynamic framework. Based on the constitutive model, a user subroutine is written in ABAQUS, enabling its numerical implementation. Then, we have established a detailed finite element model with the microstructure of the composite, which presents the local mechanical properties between the fibers and matrix. Moreover, we compare the above two models with experimental data in the literature to verify the effectiveness of the models. The above two models are used to extensively compare and predict the swelling and tensile mechanical behavior of representative volume elements (RVEs). The results show that most of them have strongly nonlinear and anisotropic mechanical behavior.


Keywords


Hydrogel composites, mechanical model, fiber distribution, finite element method

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