title: A constitutive law for degrading bioresorbable polymers.
abstract: This paper presents a constitutive law that predicts the changes in elastic moduli, Poisson's ratio and ultimate tensile strength of bioresorbable polymers due to biodegradation. During biodegradation, long polymer chains are cleaved by hydrolysis reaction. For semi-crystalline polymers, the chain scissions also lead to crystallisation. Treating each scission as a cavity and each new crystal as a solid inclusion, a degrading semi-crystalline polymer can be modelled as a continuum solid containing randomly distributed cavities and crystal inclusions. The effective elastic properties of a degrading polymer are calculated using existing theories for such solid and the tensile strength of the degrading polymer is predicted using scaling relations that were developed for porous materials. The theoretical model for elastic properties and the scaling law for strength form a complete constitutive relation for the degrading polymers. It is shown that the constitutive law can capture the trend of the experimental data in the literature for a range of biodegradable polymers fairly well.
authors.affiliation: Department of Engineering, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK.
authors.forename: Hassan
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Samami
authors.affiliation: Department of Engineering, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK. Electronic address: hs257@le.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Jingzhe
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Pan
mesh_terms: D020341:Absorbable Implants; D003460:Crystallization; D055119:Elastic Modulus; D006868:Hydrolysis; D008422:Materials Testing; D011108:Polymers / Q000737:chemistry*; D013718:Tensile Strength
chemical_list: D011108:Polymers
keywords: Cavity inclusion; Crystal inclusion; Crystalline and amorphous polymers; Effective moduli; Multi-phase material