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Modeling and experimental investigations of the stress-softening behavior of soft collagenous tissues
This paper deals with the formulation of a micro-mechanically based damage model for soft collagenous tissues. The model is motivated by (i) a sliding filament model proposed in the literature [1] and (ii) by experimental observations from electron microscopy (EM) images of human abdominal aorta specimens, see [2]. Specifically, we derive a continuum damage model that takes into account statistically distributed proteoglycan (PG) bridges. The damage model is embedded into the constitutive framework proposed by Balzani et al. [3] and adjusted to cyclic uniaxial tension tests of a human carotid artery. Furthermore, the resulting damage distribution of the model after a circumferential overstretch of a simplified arterial section is analyzed in a finite element calculation.