title: Interfacial growth during closure of a cutaneous wound: stress generation and wrinkle formation.
abstract: A biomechanical growth model for the proliferation stage of cutaneous wound healing is developed emphasizing the emergence of stress and wrinkled skin during the healing process. The healing is assumed to be primarily driven by growth at the wound edge (i.e. the interface between the wound and the skin) leading to incompatible growth strains. A closed form solution of the boundary value problem is obtained using a Varga hyperelastic membrane model for both the skin and the wound. The nature of the solution is explored for various parametric values of the skin tension, healing rate, edge incompatibility, wrinkled region radius, and wound stiffness. The obtained results for the stress field, wrinkling, and rate of healing are qualitatively in good agreement with the existing experimental observations.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur 208016, India. ag@iitk.ac.in.
authors.forename: Digendranath
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Swain
authors.forename: Anurag
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Gupta
mesh_terms: D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena; D004548:Elasticity; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D062326:Re-Epithelialization; D013314:Stress, Mechanical