A Porous Media Model for the Description of Adaptive Bone Remodelling

Abstract

Bones are strong and lightweight structures, which mainly consist of extracellular bone matrix. The bone remodelling is a process of resorption followed by replacement of the bone matrix with small changes in shape, which allow the bones to adapt according to the local loading situation.In the context of the Theory of Porous Media (TPM), a consistent model of bone tissue is introduced, which is able to describe the local accretion and reduction of the extracellular bone matrix. To this end, the bone is treated as an aggregate of two immiscible constituents. In this biphasic macroscopic model, the aggregate consists of the extracellular bone matrix and cells summarised to a solid phase and an interstitial fluid phase comprising nutrients, metabolites and bone precursors. The addition and removal of bone matrix is described by a mass exchange between the constituents, which depends upon the local strain of the material. Additionally, the growth energy is introduced as a non-mechanical quantity, which measures the average amount of chemical energy available for cell metabolism [1,2], and thus, controls the growth process. The presented numerical example illustrates the fundamental effects of bone remodelling under varying boundary conditions.

A Novel Framework for Monitoring and Analyzing Quality of Data in Simulation Workflows

“…We also conducted larger-scale experiments based on a multi-scale and multi-domain simulation workflow that calculates structure changes within a human bone [19] to evaluate the overhead of QoD measurements. We run the simulation applications on a Linux-based quad-core machine (2.3 GHz) with 6 GB main memory and the workflow middleware on a Windows-based dual-core machine (2.3 GHz) with 6 GB main memory.…”

A Life Cycle for Coupled Multi-scale, Multi-field Experiments Realized through Choreographies

“…Multi-field simulations use different scientific fields (or sub-fields) in the same experiment, e.g., physics, biology, or chemistry. An example for a multi-scale simulation is the remodeling of bones using the Theory of Porous Media [2]. Here, the cell and tissue model in the human body can be coupled with a bone model.…”