When: Thursay 4 April 2013
Where: Ceres building, CE0.31, TU/e campus

The microstructures of many materials often lead to anisotropic response of the material at the macroscopic level.

This is the case with many soft biological tissues, for which the fibrous structure induces, for example, transversely isotropic or orthotropic properties. To describe the elastic properties of these materials in terms of macroscopic constitutive laws certain deformation invariants based on so-called ‘structure tensors’ which reflect the structure at the microscopic level are usually adopted. In the first part of this talk we illustrate this approach by its application to the modelling of the passive elastic properties of the myocardium.

Structure tensors are also valuable in other contexts. For example, in modelling the behaviour of magneto-sensitive elastomers or electro-sensitive polymers and in developing constitutive laws for residually-stressed materials. The second part of the talk focuses on the nonlinear response of magnetoelastic materials, and, if there is time, the structure tensor approach to incorporating residual stresses in elastic constitutive laws will be discussed briefly.