Selective smoothed finite element methods for extremely large deformation of anisotropic incompressible bio-tissues

SUMMARYTwo dynamic selective smoothed FEM (selective S‐FEM) are proposed for analysis of extremely large deformation of anisotropic incompressible bio‐tissues using the simplest four‐node tetrahedron elements. In the present two Selective S‐FEMs, the method that consists of the face‐based smoothed FEM (FS‐FEM) used for the deviatoric part of deformation and the node‐based smoothed FEM (NS‐FEM) used for the volumetric part is called FS/NS‐FEM; another method that replaces the deviatoric part of deformation in the first one by the edge‐based smoothed FEM (3D‐ES‐FEM) is call 3D‐ES/NS‐FEM. Both selective S‐FEMs can achieve outstanding accuracy, and stability of volumetric locking free. This is because the NS‐FEM offers an ‘overly‐soft’ feature (in contrast to the standard FEM ‘overly‐stiff’ model), which can be used to effectively mitigate the volumetric locking, and on the other hand, the 3D‐ES‐FEM and FS‐FEM produce close to exact stiffness for the discretized model leading to accurate solution. Numerical examples are presented to examine the performance of the selective S‐FEM methods, including soft bio‐tissues that may be isotropic, transversely isotropic, and anisotropic arterial layered materials. The present methods are found having good accuracy and performance. The examples also demonstrate that the proposed methods are very robust and possess remarkable capabilities of handling element distortion, which is very useful for simulating soft materials including bio‐tissues. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.