Layer-specific damage experiments and modeling of human thoracic and abdominal aortas with non-atherosclerotic intimal thickening

Creating a model of diseased artery damage and failure from healthy porcine aorta

“…Control samples produced similar k 1 values to those reported by Weisbecker, et al, but lower k 2 values [33]. Gundiah, et al reported decreases in k 2 in collagenase samples compared with controls, as here, but with an accompanying increase in k 1 , the latter not seen here [18].…”

“…Comparing the control results to findings in the literature, θ is similar, which encourages confidence in the reliability of the fitted data [33]. However, histological and multiphoton microscopy investigations of collagen fibre orientation have suggested closer alignment with the circumferential direction than our model fits suggest.…”

“…κ was set to 0.046 in accord with Shriefl et al [38]. The shear modulus µ was fixed at 3 kPa (based on initial tests and values found in previous studies [33]), as initial tests revealed that altering it had little effect on the overall behaviour at the large stretches seen here, where the exponential fibre terms dominate. Correspondingly, the matrix component of the CDM was also omitted thereafter.…”

“…This has been used frequently to capture the response of arterial walls in uniaxial tension [33,34,20]. Weakening of the material, as it is deformed beyond its elastic range, and ultimate failure is incorporated into the model by means of a continuum damage model (CDM) [1].…”

“…As described in [33], for the uniaxial tension test configuration, the first principal stress may be computed from:…”