Modeling Tunable Fracture in Hydrogel Shell Structures for Biomedical Applications

Hydrogels are nowadays widely used in various biomedical applications, and show great potential for the making of devices such as biosensors, drug- delivery vectors, carriers, or matrices for cell cultures in tissue engineering, etc. In these applications, due to the irregular complex surface of the human body or its organs/structures, the devices are often designed with a small thickness, and are required to be flexible when attached to biological surfaces. The devices will deform as driven by human motion and under external loading. In terms of mechanical modeling, most of these devices can be abstracted as shells. In this paper, we propose a mixed graph-finite element method (FEM) phase field approach to model the fracture of curved shells composed of hydrogels, for biomedical applications. We present herein examples for the fracture of a wearable biosensor, a membrane-coated drug, and a matrix for a cell culture, each made of a hydrogel. Used in combination with experimental material testing, our method opens a new pathway to the efficient modeling of fracture in biomedical devices with surfaces of arbitrary curvature, helping in the design of devices with tunable fracture properties.

Automated summary

Hydrogels have wide-ranging applications in biomedicine and can be used to create devices such as biosensors, drug-delivery vectors, and cell culture matrices. In this study, a mixed graph-finite element method (FEM) phase field approach is proposed to model the fracture of hydrogel-based curved shells in biomedical devices. By combining this method with experimental material testing, the efficient modeling of fracture in devices with surfaces of arbitrary curvature can be achieved, facilitating the design of devices with tunable fracture properties.