Simulation of passive myocardium of rabbit ventricles, using selective smoothed finite element method(S-FEM)

A selective smoothed finite element method (Selective S-FEM) is developed for dynamic 3D analysis of extremely large deformation of incompressible bio-tissues, using the simplest 4-node tetrahedron elements. In the present selective S-FEM, face-based Smoothed FEM (FS-FEM) and node-based Smoothed FEM (NS-FEM) are, respectively, used for the deviatoric and volumetric parts of the deformation of incompressible bio-tissues. Therefore the “overly-soft” feature of the NS-FEM is made use of for mitigating the volumetric locking that may occur in bio soft tissue. Because the FS-FEM can provide close-to-exact stiffness, our selective S-FEM can provide an accurate solution. In the current formulation, the soft tissue is modeled using the hyperelastic constitutive law. Numerical examples are presented to simulate a passive filling process of anatomical rabbit ventricles. It is demonstrated that the Selective S-FEM possess good potential for accurately simulating the behavior of bio-tissues for reliable solution..