Brain tissues are known for exhibiting complex nonlinear and time-dependent properties, which require visco-hyperelastic constitutive models for proper simulation. In this paper, a Total Lagrangian Explicit Selective Smoothed Finite Element Method (Selective S-FEM) is formulated to analyze the dynamic behavior of incompressible brain tissues undergoing extremely large deformation. The proposed Selective S-FEM deals with three-dimensional problems using four-node tetrahedron elements that can be automatically generated for geometrically complex soft tissues. It consists of the three key ingredients. (i) A visco-hyperelastic constitutive model is developed within the framework of S-FEM in the first time, allowing adequate modeling of the dynamic brain tissue behavior. (ii) Selective S-FEM strategy is used for overcome the mesh distortion and the volumetric locking that often occurs in soft tissues. (iii) Total Lagrangian formulation is used in an explicit algorithm allowing rigorous simulation of extreme large deformation. (iv) A combined implementation of Selective S-FEM with the visco-hyperelastic constitutive model for dynamic simulations. The shear deformation is calculated by Face/Edge-based S-FEM, and the volume deformation is calculated by NS-FEM. Numerical experiments show that Selective S-FEM is a robust solver with good accuracy, and excellent ability to reduce element distortion effects in simulate time-dependence behavior of bio-tissues.
In this work, a three-dimensional (3D) nonlinear smoothed finite element method (S-FEM) solver is developed for large deformation problems. Node-based and face-based S-FEM using automatically generable four-noded tetrahedral elements (NS-FEM-Te4 and FS-FEM-Te4) are adopted to find the solution bounds in strain energy. The lower bound solutions are obtained using FEM-Te4 and FS-FEM-Te4, while the upper bound solutions are obtained using NS-FEM-Te4. A combined [Formula: see text]S-FEM-Te4 with a scaling factor [Formula: see text] that controls the combination is constructed to find nearly exact solutions for the nonlinear solids mechanics problems through adjusting [Formula: see text]. This is achieved using the property that a successive change of scaling factor [Formula: see text] can make the model transform from “overly-stiff” to “overly-soft”. Considering the properties of FS-FEM and NS-FEM, a selective FS/NS-FEM-TE4 is also used to solve 3D nonlinear large deformation problems, which produces a lower bound in strain energy. Hyperelastic Mooney–Rivlin and Ogden materials are both used in this study. Numerical examples reveal that S-FEM-Te4 is an effective method for obtaining solution bounds together with the standard FEM, and the FS-FEM-Te4, NS-FEM-Te4 and selective FS/NS-FEM-TE4 are robust with the high accuracy and computational efficiency for large deformation nonlinear problems.
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