Jim (?),
I am in the process of choosing an open-source FE library to model the
knee complex (femur, tibia, meniscus and cartilages). I have been using
FEBio GUI tools which specialize in modeling rigid and deformable
interactions but I was not very satisfied with the API and the available
documentation. I would like to know if I would be able to model the
following features with dealii:
1) interaction between femur bone (model as rigid body) and femoral
cartilage (model as deformable) to reduce the degrees of freedom of the
model
If the bone really is rigid, then it is probably easiest to not model it
via the finite element method by meshing it, but by just describing it
via its 6 degrees of freedom (3 positions plus 3 rotations). This would
mean that you'd only describe the deformable part of the domain through
the finite element method, with boundary conditions imposed based on the
state of the bone. The bone's state would then be updated based on the
forces exerted by the cartilage.
This would be a bit non-standard, but I don't see a fundamental
difficulty to this.
2) prescribed orientation, position and body forces for rigid bodies as
initial conditions
Yes.
3) study contract and pressure between deformables (e.g. collision
between cartilage and meniscus)
This is a modeling question for which it is important to know what
mathematical formulation you use. People have described contact problems
in deal.II, and there is a tutorial program (step-42) that shows a
problem where one body is impacted by a rigid other body. In your case,
you'd have to develop a method to deal with two deformable bodies. That,
too, has been done, but it's clearly more work (both mathematically as
well as implementation wise).
Do you know of any examples or projects that have used dealii for
similar problems (in biomechanics)?
In addition to step-42, you may want to go through the list of code
gallery programs here:
https://dealii.org/developer/doxygen/deal.II/CodeGallery.html
There are also many projects of which we don't have the code but where
the author may be willing to share what they had done. I would take a
look at the publications that have used deal.II:
http://dealii.org/publications.html
Best
W.
--
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Wolfgang Bangerth email: [email protected]
www: http://www.math.colostate.edu/~bangerth/
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