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Numerical Approach to Simulate the Mechanical Behavior of Biodegradable Polymers during Erosion

Biodegradable polymers find applications in many market segments. The ability to meet mechanical requirements within a certain time range, after which it degrades and is naturally absorbed, can be used to produce short-term use products that can be easily disposable with less environmental impact. I...

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Autores principales: Vieira, André F. C., Da Silva, Enio H. P., Ribeiro, Marcelo L.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10181274/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37177128
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/polym15091979
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author Vieira, André F. C.
Da Silva, Enio H. P.
Ribeiro, Marcelo L.
author_facet Vieira, André F. C.
Da Silva, Enio H. P.
Ribeiro, Marcelo L.
author_sort Vieira, André F. C.
collection PubMed
description Biodegradable polymers find applications in many market segments. The ability to meet mechanical requirements within a certain time range, after which it degrades and is naturally absorbed, can be used to produce short-term use products that can be easily disposable with less environmental impact. In the segment of medical devices used in regenerative medicine, these materials are used to produce temporary implants that are naturally assimilated by the human body, avoiding a removal surgery. However, the design of these temporary devices still presents great challenges, namely in the verification of the main requirement: the lifetime of the device, associated with the progressive loss of mechanical properties, until its complete erosion and assimilation. Thus, in this study, a numerical approach is proposed to simulate the polymeric device’s mechanical behavior during its hydrolytic degradation by combining the hydrolysis kinetics, that depends on mechanical factors and promotes a decrease of molecular weight and consequent decrease of mechanical performance, and erosion, when molecular weight reaches a threshold value and the polymer becomes soluble and diffuses outward, resulting in mass loss and decreasing cross-sectional area, which also contributes to the mechanical performance reduction of the device. A phenomenological approach, using the combination of continuum-based hydrolytic damage for the evolution of mechanical properties that depends on the stress field and further removal of the degraded element (to simulate mass loss) was used. Both elastoplastic and hyperelastic constitutive models were applied on this study, where the material model parameters locally depend on the molecular weight.
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spelling pubmed-101812742023-05-13 Numerical Approach to Simulate the Mechanical Behavior of Biodegradable Polymers during Erosion Vieira, André F. C. Da Silva, Enio H. P. Ribeiro, Marcelo L. Polymers (Basel) Article Biodegradable polymers find applications in many market segments. The ability to meet mechanical requirements within a certain time range, after which it degrades and is naturally absorbed, can be used to produce short-term use products that can be easily disposable with less environmental impact. In the segment of medical devices used in regenerative medicine, these materials are used to produce temporary implants that are naturally assimilated by the human body, avoiding a removal surgery. However, the design of these temporary devices still presents great challenges, namely in the verification of the main requirement: the lifetime of the device, associated with the progressive loss of mechanical properties, until its complete erosion and assimilation. Thus, in this study, a numerical approach is proposed to simulate the polymeric device’s mechanical behavior during its hydrolytic degradation by combining the hydrolysis kinetics, that depends on mechanical factors and promotes a decrease of molecular weight and consequent decrease of mechanical performance, and erosion, when molecular weight reaches a threshold value and the polymer becomes soluble and diffuses outward, resulting in mass loss and decreasing cross-sectional area, which also contributes to the mechanical performance reduction of the device. A phenomenological approach, using the combination of continuum-based hydrolytic damage for the evolution of mechanical properties that depends on the stress field and further removal of the degraded element (to simulate mass loss) was used. Both elastoplastic and hyperelastic constitutive models were applied on this study, where the material model parameters locally depend on the molecular weight. MDPI 2023-04-22 /pmc/articles/PMC10181274/ /pubmed/37177128 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/polym15091979 Text en © 2023 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Vieira, André F. C.
Da Silva, Enio H. P.
Ribeiro, Marcelo L.
Numerical Approach to Simulate the Mechanical Behavior of Biodegradable Polymers during Erosion
title Numerical Approach to Simulate the Mechanical Behavior of Biodegradable Polymers during Erosion
title_full Numerical Approach to Simulate the Mechanical Behavior of Biodegradable Polymers during Erosion
title_fullStr Numerical Approach to Simulate the Mechanical Behavior of Biodegradable Polymers during Erosion
title_full_unstemmed Numerical Approach to Simulate the Mechanical Behavior of Biodegradable Polymers during Erosion
title_short Numerical Approach to Simulate the Mechanical Behavior of Biodegradable Polymers during Erosion
title_sort numerical approach to simulate the mechanical behavior of biodegradable polymers during erosion
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10181274/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37177128
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/polym15091979
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