Residual stresses resulting from growth and remodeling in arterial walls

Abstract

A model for multiplicative anisotropic growth in soft biological tissues, which relates the growth tensor to the fibrous tissue structure, is combined with a fiber remode- ling framework. Both adaptation mechanisms are supposed to be governed by the intensity and the directions of the tensile principal stresses. Numerical examples on idealized arterial segments, illustrating stress and fiber angle distributions as well as resulting residual stresses in cases with and without fiber remodeling, are presented. It turns out that all processes including growth and remodeling are necessary to obtain qualitatively realistic distributions of fiber orientations, residual stresses, and stresses under loading.