title: A microstructurally inspired damage model for early venous thrombus.
abstract: Accumulative damage may be an important contributor to many cases of thrombotic disease progression. Thus, a complete understanding of the pathological role of thrombus requires an understanding of its mechanics and in particular mechanical consequences of damage. In the current study, we introduce a novel microstructurally inspired constitutive model for thrombus that considers a non-uniform distribution of microstructural fibers at various crimp levels and employs one of the distribution parameters to incorporate stretch-driven damage on the microscopic level. To demonstrate its ability to represent the mechanical behavior of thrombus, including a recently reported Mullins type damage phenomenon, we fit our model to uniaxial tensile test data of early venous thrombus. Our model shows an agreement with these data comparable to previous models for damage in elastomers with the added advantages of a microstructural basis and fewer model parameters. We submit that our novel approach marks another important step toward modeling the evolving mechanics of intraluminal thrombus, specifically its damage, and hope it will aid in the study of physiological and pathological thrombotic events.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, Yale University, New Haven, CT, United States. Electronic address: manuel.rausch@yale.edu.
authors.forename: Manuel K
authors.initials: MK
authors.lastname: Rausch
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, Yale University, New Haven, CT, United States.
authors.forename: Jay D
authors.initials: JD
authors.lastname: Humphrey
mesh_terms: D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena; D055595:Mechanical Phenomena; D008954:Models, Biological; D013927:Thrombosis / Q000473:pathology*; D014680:Veins / Q000473:pathology*
keywords: Continuum damage mechanics; Intraluminal thrombus; Material modeling; Uniaxial tensile properties