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Fatigue of self-healing hierarchical soft nanomaterials: The case study of the tendon in sportsmen

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Abstract

One of the defining properties of biological structural materials is self-healing, i.e., the ability to undergo long-term reparation after instantaneous damaging events, but also after microdamage due to repeated load cycling. To correctly model the fatigue life of such materials, self-healing must be included in fracture and fatigue laws, and related codes. Here, we adopt a numerical modelization of fatigue cycling of self-healing biological materials based on the hierarchical fiber bundle model and propose modifications in Griffith’s and Paris’ laws to account for the presence of self-healing. Simulations allow us to numerically verify these modified expressions and highlight the effect of the self-healing rate, in particular, for collagen-based materials such as human tendons and ligaments. The study highlights the effectiveness of the self healing process even for small healing rates and provides the possibility of improving the reliability of predictions of fatigue life in biomechanics, e.g., in sports medicine.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

NMP acknowledges support from the European Research Council, ERC Ideas Starting Grant No. 279985 “BIHSNAM”, from ERC Proof of Concept Grant No. 619448 “REPLICA2” and No. 632277 “KNOTOUGH”, from the Graphene FET Flagship (“Graphene-Based Revolutions in ICT And Beyond”-Grant agreement No. 604391), and from the Autonomous Province of Trento (Graphene PAT WP10, code 81017). FB acknowledges support from BIHSNAM. The authors also acknowledge support for computational resources from Politecnico di Torino’s DAUIN High Performance Computing Initiative (www.dauin-hpc.polito.it).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics and “Nanostructured Interfaces and Surfaces” Interdepartmental Centre, Università di Torino, Torino, 10125, Italy

    Federico Bosia

  2. Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02139, USA

    Matthew Merlino

  3. Laboratory of Bio-Inspired & Graphene Nanomechanics, Department of Civil, Environmental and Mechanical Engineering, Università di Trento, Trento, I-38123, Italy

    Nicola M. Pugno

  4. Center for Materials and Microsystems, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Povo (Trento), I-38123, Italy

    Nicola M. Pugno

  5. School of Engineering and Materials Science, Queen Mary University of London, London, E1 4NS, UK

    Nicola M. Pugno

Authors
  1. Federico Bosia
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  2. Matthew Merlino
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  3. Nicola M. Pugno
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Correspondence to Nicola M. Pugno.

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This author was an editor of this focus issue during the review and decision stage. For the JMR policy on review and publication of manuscripts authored by editors, please refer to http://www.mrs.org/jmr-editor-manuscripts/.

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Bosia, F., Merlino, M. & Pugno, N.M. Fatigue of self-healing hierarchical soft nanomaterials: The case study of the tendon in sportsmen. Journal of Materials Research 30, 2–9 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1557/jmr.2014.335

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