A phase-field model for fracture in biological tissues

This work presents a recently developed phase-field model of fracture equipped with anisotropic crack driving force to model failure phenomena in soft biological tissues at finite deformations. The phase-field models present a promising and innovative approach to thermodynamically consistent modeling of fracture, applicable to both rate-dependent or rate-independent brittle and ductile failure modes. One key advantage of diffusive crack modeling lies in predicting the complex crack topologies where methods with sharp crack discontinuities are known to suffer. The starting point is the derivation of a regularized crack surface functional that ({varGamma })-converges to a sharp crack topology for vanishing length-scale parameter. A constitutive balance equation of this functional governs the crack phase-field evolution in a modular format in terms of a crack driving state function. This allows flexibility to introduce alternative stress-based failure criteria, e.g., isotropic or anisotropic, whose maximum value from the deformation history drives the irreversible crack phase field. The resulting multi-field problem is solved by a robust operator split scheme that successively updates a history field, the crack phase field and finally the displacement field in a typical time step. For the representative numerical simulations, a hyperelastic anisotropic free energy, typical to incompressible soft biological tissues, is used which degrades with evolving phase field as a result of coupled constitutive setup. A quantitative comparison with experimental data is provided for verification of the proposed methodology.