A validation of the quadriphasic mixture theory for intervertebral disc tissue (Q1388345)

The swelling and shrinking behaviour of soft biological tissues can be described by a quadriphase mixture model. In this model four phases are distinguished: a charged solid, a fluid, cations and anions. We give a description of the coupled differential equations of this quadriphasic mixture model, and solve these equations by the finite element method using a weighted residual approach. The resulting nonlinear integral equations are linearized and solved by the Newton-Raphson iteration procedure. We perform some confined swelling and compression numerical experiments on intervertebal disc tissue.