Viscoelasticity in Biological Tissues

4.0 credits

Viscoelastic materials have the capacity to both store and dissipate energy. As a result, properly describing their mechanical behavior lies outside the scope of both solid mechanics and fluid mechanics. This course will develop constitutive relations and strategies for solving boundary value problems in linear viscoelastic materials. In addition, the closely-related biphasic theory for fluid-filled porous solids will be introduced. An emphasis will be placed on applications to cartilage, tendon, ligament, muscle, blood vessels, and other biological tissues. Advanced topics including non-linear viscoelasticity, composite viscoelasticity and physical mechanisms of viscoelasticity will be surveyed.