No abstract

The simulation of human body movement is a valuable tool for different fields such as robotics and biomechanics. Even with the growing number of researches, there are still few groups in Brazil that work on developing models of human movement.Such simulation has been a challenging problem from a modeling and computational point of view. This dissertation brings a bibliographical review of concepts of structural dynamics and the main determinants of the dynamics of human walking. Four twodimensional models of increasing complexity found in the literature are initially analyzed to understand the influence of the various elements and degrees of freedom on the quality of the obtained results. Before introducing these models, an investigation of some kinematic variables, known as determinants of walking, is performed for the simple support phase. The simpler model considers an inverted pendulum, and then joints are added to simulate the hip, knee, ankle/foot, and finally the entire leg mechanism is replaced by a spring. The effects of successive additions of degrees of freedom are analyzed and the results are compared with Winter's experimental results for torques and reaction forces. Based on these analyzes, this work proposes a twodimensional model of human walking during the simple support phase (SSP) with seven degrees of freedom. The forces resulting from muscular actions are represented by torques at each joint. All masses of upper body segments are grouped. The model is based on inverse dynamics, with angular displacements being interpolated by 5th degree B-splines and the body kinematics is calculated using the Denavit-Hartenberg (DH) robotic formulation. The equations of motion are obtained based on a recursive Lagrangian formulation, due to its computational efficiency. An optimization problem is established to obtain the B-splines control points, where the objective function is defined by the dynamic effort. The constraints imposed on movement are of two types: the time-dependent constraints (torque/angle limits and dynamic stability defined by the PUC-Rio -Certificação Digital Nº 1712766/CA Zero Moment Point criterion) and the independent time constraints (initial and final state). The results of the model are favorably compared with Winter's experimental data, in particular the ground reaction forces.

Sophisticated muscle material models are required to perform detailed finite element simulations of soft tissue; however, state-of-the-art muscle models are not among the built-in materials in popular commercial finite element software packages. Implementing user-defined muscle material models is challenging for two reasons: deriving the tangent modulus tensor for a material with a complex strain energy function is tedious and programming the algorithm to compute it is error-prone. These challenges hinder widespread use of such models in software that employs implicit, nonlinear, Newton-type finite element methods. We implement a muscle material model in Ansys using an approximation of the tangent modulus, which simplifies its derivation and implementation. Three test models were constructed by revolving a rectangle (RR), a right trapezoid (RTR), and a generic obtuse trapezoid (RTO) around the muscle's centerline. A displacement was applied to one end of each muscle, holding the other end fixed. The results were validated against analogous simulations in FEBio, which uses the same muscle model but with the exact tangent modulus. Overall, good agreement was found between our Ansys and FEBio simulations, though some noticeable discrepancies were observed. For the elements along the muscle's centerline, the root-mean-square-percentage error in the Von Mises stress was 0.00%, 3.03%, and 6.75% for the RR, RTR, and RTO models, respectively; similar errors in longitudinal strain were observed. We provide our Ansys implementation so that others can reproduce and extend our results.