On the numerical treatment of initial strains in biological soft tissues

In this paper, different methodologies to enforce initial stresses or strains in finite strain problems are compared. Since our main interest relies on the simulation of living tissues, an orthotropic hyperelastic constitutive model has been used to describe their passive material behaviour. Different methods are presented and discussed. Firstly, the initial strain distribution is obtained after deformation from a previously assumed to be known stress-free state using an appropriate finite element approach. This approach usually involves important mesh distortions. The second method consists on imposing the initial strain field from the definition of an initial incompatible ‘deformation gradient’ field obtained from experimental data. This incompatible tensor field can be imposed in two ways, depending on the origin of the experimental tests. In some cases as ligaments, the experiment is carried out from the stress-free configuration, while in blood vessels the starting point is usually the load-free configuration with residual stresses. So the strain energy function would remain the same for the whole simulation or redefined from the new origin of the experiment. Some validation and realistic examples are presented to show the performance of the strategies and to quantify the errors appearing in each of them. Copyright 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd