ABSTRACT
Determining mechanical properties of abdominal soft tissues requires a coupled experimental-numerical study, but first an appropriate numerical model needs to be built. Precise modeling of human abdominal wall mechanics is difficult because of its complicated multi-layer composition and large variation between specimens. There are several approaches concerning simplification of numerical models, but it is unclear how far one could go to still maintain fairly good results. The study compares behaviour of two different shell models: a simpler one, consisting of a single composite shell incorporating all abdominal wall layers and a more complicated one, consisting of three respective muscle-fascia composites allowed to slide on one another, representing a more realistic abdominal wall behaviour. Both models were subjected to the same loading and boundary conditions in a series of different non-linear analyses, including implicit, explicit, static and dynamic variants. The study shows that the two tested models differ greatly in terms of the obtained displacements, thus the sliding mechanism of muscle-fascia layers should not be ignored. As a side task, several finite element types were tested for proficiency in this particular computation.
