Published: Feb. 22, 2011

Modeling Skeletal Muscle Mechanics: The Grand-Overview

Oliver Röhrle

 

Stuttgart Research Centre for Simulation Technology and Cluster of Excellence “Simulation Technology” (SimTech)

Date and time: 

Tuesday, February 22, 2011 - 3:45pm

Abstract: 

A skeletal muscle is a complex electro-mechanical system with inhomogeneous electrical and mechanical properties. Many different skeletal muscle models have been developed in the past. Within this presentation, a special emphasis will be on a novel multi-scale and three-dimensional skeletal muscle model that couples the electrophysiological behavior on the cellular level to the mechanics of the entire skeletal muscle (organ level). On the cellular level, the electrophysiological behavior of a cell is described by a set of coupled ordinary differential equations. The propagation of the electrical potentials along the single muscle fibers is solved using the 1D bidomain equation. In order to couple the cellular variables and the anatomical structure of the respective muscle to the organ level, the cellular variables are homogenized and included within a macroscopic constitutive law. The biomechanical behavior can then be obtained by solving the governing equations of finite elasticity.