On the mechanical modeling of anisotropic biological soft tissue and iterative parallel solution strategies

Biological soft tissues appearing in arterial walls are characterized by a nearly incompressible, anisotropic, hyperelastic material behavior in the physiological range of deformations. For the representation of such materials we apply a polyconvex strain energy function in order to ensure the existence of minimizers and in order to satisfy the Legendre–Hadamard condition automatically. The 3D discretization results in a large system of equations; therefore, a parallel algorithm is applied to solve the equilibrium problem. Domain decomposition methods like the Dual-Primal Finite Element Tearing and Interconnecting (FETI-DP) method are designed to solve large linear systems of equations, that arise from the discretization of partial differential equations, on parallel computers. Their numerical and parallel scalability, as well as their robustness, also in the incompressible limit, has been shown theoretically and in numerical simulations. We are using a dual-primal FETI method to solve nonlinear, anisotropic elasticity problems for 3D models of arterial walls and present some preliminary numerical results.