ABSTRACT
That mechanics is involved in the growth and structuration processes of biological tissues has been suggested for years. As early as in 1892, based on his observations as an orthopedic surgeon, Julius Wolff suggested that the internal structure and external shape of bones adapt to both an increase and a decrease of the loads. As a corollary to Wolff’s law of bone remodeling, Davis’s law of soft tissues describes how protagonistic and antagonistic muscles thin and lengthen or thicken and shorten in response to posture. While immature articular cartilage contains vessels that circulate nutrients, adult articular cartilage is aneural, avascular and alymphatic. Nutrients from the synovial joint are transported by the extracellular fluid through diffusion and convection. For soft tissues, the rate of mass deposition, or removal, is often taken proportional to a difference between certain components of the local stress and their homeostatic values, the proportionality coefficient containing information on the characteristic time scale of the process.
