Modeling of Anisotropic Damage in Arterial Walls

In a certain range of overexpansion arterial walls are characterized by an orthotropic elastic material behavior. Due to different stabilities of the helically arranged fibers, i.e. breakage of collagen crosslinks between the fibers, damage effects are observed in experiments. Because of the fibrous composition it is assumed that damage mainly occurs in the fiber direction. The proposed damage model is extended to arterial wall applications by introducing a referential damage state. The damage approach is applied to a polyconvex model for the hyperelastic behavior of arteries in order to obtain a materially stable model, which guarantees the existence of solutions of the underlying boundary value problem. The performance of the proposed model is presented in a numerical example, where the overexpansion of an atherosclerotic artery is simulated. (© 2005 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)