Developing failure criteria for laceration injury of dermal tissue.

Despite its importance, there is a poor understanding of human injury tolerance to trauma generally, and more specifically understanding of the mechanics of skin penetration or laceration. The objective of this analysis is to determine the failure criteria that will allow the evaluation of the laceration risk of blunt-tipped edges within a computational modeling environment. An axisymmetric tissue finite element model was set up in Abaqus 2021 to match the experimental set-up from a previous study. The model simulated the pressing of penetrometer geometries into dermal tissue, and stress and strain outputs were evaluated at the experimental failure force. Two separate nonlinear hyperelastic material models were calibrated for the dermis to data from the literature (high and low stiffness models). For both the high-stiffness and low-stiffness skin models, the failure force appears to occur near a local maximum in the principal strain. All failures occurred after the maximum strain near or at the top surface is or above 59%, with mid-thickness strain at a similar level. The strain energy density is concentrated near the edge tip for each configuration, indicating highly localized material damage at the point of loading, and increases rapidly prior to the approximate failure force. As the edge is further compressed into the tissue, the stress triaxiality near the edge contacting point decreases towards zero. This study has identified general failure criteria for skin laceration which can be implemented in a computational model. A higher risk for laceration would be indicated with strain energy density larger than 60 mJ/mm3, dermal strain larger than 55%, and stress triaxiality below 0.1. These findings were largely insensitive to the dermal stiffness and broadly applicable across different indenter geometries. It is expected that this framework may be implemented to evaluate hazardous forces for product edges, interactions with robots, and interfaces with medical and drug delivery devices.

Effect of working environment and procedural strategies on mechanical performance of bioresorbable vascular scaffolds.

Polymeric bioresorbable scaffolds (BRS), at their early stages of invention, were considered as a promising revolution in interventional cardiology. However, they failed dramatically compared to metal stents showing substantially higher incidence of device failure and clinical events, especially thrombosis. One problem is that use of paradigms inherited from metal stents ignores dependency of polymer material properties on working environment and manufacturing/deployment steps. Unlike metals, polymeric material characterization experiments cannot be considered identical under dry and submerged conditions at varying rates of operation. We demonstrated different material behaviors associated with variable testing environment and parameters. We, then, have employed extracted material models, which are verified by computational methods, to assess the performance of a full-scale BRS in different working condition and under varying procedural strategies. Our results confirm the accepted notion that slower rate of crimping and inflation can potentially reduce stress concentrations and thus reduce localized damages. However, we reveal that using a universal set of material properties derived from a benchtop experiment conducted regardless of working environment and procedural variability may lead to a significant error in estimation of stress-induced damages and overestimation of benefits procedural updates might offer. We conclude that, for polymeric devices, microstructural damages and localized loss of structural integrity should complement former macroscopic performance-assessment measures (fracture and recoil). Though, to precisely capture localized stress concentration and microstructural damages, context-related testing environment and clinically-relevant procedural scenarios should be devised in preliminary experiments of polymeric resorbable devices to enhance their efficacy and avoid unpredicted clinical events. STATEMENT OF SIGNIFICANCE: Bioresorbable scaffolds (BRS) with the hope to become the next cardiovascular interventional revolution failed in comparison to metal stents. When BRS were characterized using methods for metal stents, designers were misled to seek problem sources at erroneous timeframe and use inefficient indicators, and thus no signal of concern emerged. We demonstrated fundamental flaws associated with applying a universal set of material properties to study device performances in different phases of manufacturing/implantation, and these may be responsible for failure in predicting performance in first-generation BRS. We introduced new criterion for the assessment of structural integrity and device efficacy in next-generation BRS, and indeed all devices using polymeric materials which evolve with the environment they reside in.

3D Plate-Lattices: An Emerging Class of Low-Density Metamaterial Exhibiting Optimal Isotropic Stiffness.

In lightweight engineering, there is a constant quest for low-density materials featuring high mass-specific stiffness and strength. Additively-manufactured metamaterials are particularly promising candidates as the controlled introduction of porosity allows for tailoring their density while activating strengthening size-effects at the nano- and microstructural level. Here, plate-lattices are conceived by placing plates along the closest-packed planes of crystal structures. Based on theoretical analysis, a general design map is developed for elastically isotropic plate-lattices of cubic symmetry. In addition to validating the design map, detailed computational analysis reveals that there even exist plate-lattice compositions that provide nearly isotropic yield strength together with elastic isotropy. The most striking feature of plate-lattices is that their stiffness and yield strength are within a few percent of the theoretical limits for isotropic porous solids. This implies that the stiffness of isotropic plate-lattices is up to three times higher than that of the stiffest truss-lattices of equal mass. This stiffness advantage is also confirmed by experiments on truss- and plate-lattice specimens fabricated through direct laser writing. Due to their porous internal structure, the potential impact of the new metamaterials reported here goes beyond lightweight engineering, including applications for heat-exchange, thermal insulation, acoustics, and biomedical engineering.