Inhomogeneous swelling of a gel in equilibrium with a solvent and mechanical load
A network of polymers can imbibe a large quantity of a solvent and swell, resulting in a gel. The swelling process can be markedly influenced by a mechanical load and geometric constraint. When the network, solvent, and mechanical load equilibrate, the gel usually swells by a field of inhomogeneous and anisotropic deformation. We show that this field in the swollen gel is equivalent to that in a hyperelastic solid. We implement this theory in the finite-element package, ABAQUS, and analyze examples of swelling-induced deformation, contact, and bifurcation. Because commercial software like ABAQUS is widely available, this work may provide a powerful tool to study complex phenomena in gels.
The source code of the UHYPER program is attached below.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| gel.for_.txt | 2.32 KB |
| gel_in_equilibrium_2008_05_06 submit.pdf | 711.69 KB |
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Hi, Zhigang, thank you very much for your info. Also Hello, Wei, Great congratulation to you for your new position in Iowa State University. Hope to keep in close touch in future.
This paper is of great interest to me, especially on the simulation of 2-D complex gel with commercial software ABAQUS. May I have a concern to be clarified, that is, how to understand that the chemical potential of the solvent molecules, mu=kT(p/p0) and is also defined as Eq.(2), say mu=dW(F,C)/dC? Thank you very much fro your time.