Biomechanics on the Growth and Deformation of Living Tissues and its Applications to Engineering

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The purposes of this project were : 1) to study the functional adaptation of living tissues and organs to various mechanical environment, 2) to apply the optimal adaptation mechanisms to the development of new engineering methodologies, and 3) to establish a new organization for international cooperative research activities. The main results obtained are :1. Arterial wall thickness increased promptly with the increase in blood pressure, Keeping the wall stress within a physiological range, followed by the change in such material properties as elastic modulus.2. Release of tension in the patellar tendon decreased the tensile strength (fracture load divided by initial cross sectional area) rapidly and remarkably, while the strength was not changed by over-stressing. In response to these variation of mechanical environment, the cross sectional area of ligament increased compensatively to keep the structural strength at a normal level.3. Air way-lung system was modelled considering the gas … More transportation in the air way, deformation behavior and surface tension of the lung, gas exchange between the alveolus and blood, and so on, which was successfully applied to simulate the respiratory mechanics.4. An in-plane stress-based 3-D finite element model was proposed for the stress/strain analyses in the human whole lumbar spine, and successfully applied to analyze the stress distribution in each component of the normal and diseased spines exposed to various load condition.5. The functional adaptation observed with living systems has possibilities of being applied to engineering field, for example, like the growth strain method for structural design. The technique developed to analyze the solid-fluid-gas interaction in biological systems would be very useful for the design and analysis of similar complex engineering systems.6. By the action of the investigators for this project, the World Committee for Biomechanics has been established for the efficient exchange of information and international cooperative studies. Less