Modeling the mechanics and the transport phenomena in hydrogels
Book chapter, 2018

Hydrogels are polymeric materials widely used in pharmaceutical and biomedical applications. Their uses can be improved by modeling their behavior, in particular the mechanical phenomena and the transport phenomena. The scope of this chapter is to propose a model, simple enough and with a limited number of parameters to be determined, able to capture the full behavior of a swelling hydrogel, with the aim of describing the drug release process as well as—in principle—any other application of hydrogels. The model was derived recalling the basics of the continuum mechanics, the possible approaches to estimate the Helmholtz free energy, and then writing the transport and constitutive equations for a poroelastic material, and for a more realistic poroviscoelastic material (by adding the standard linear solid model as the rheological model). A full extension to multicomponent systems, to describe the drug release phenomenon, is proposed along with a sensitivity analysis (free-swelling simulation by changing the model parameters).

Hydrogels

Viscoelasticity

Transport phenomena

Mechanics

Modeling

Drug release

Poroviscoelasticity

Author

D. Caccavo

University of Salerno

Antonella Vietri

University of Salerno

Gaetano Lamberti

University of Salerno

Anna Angela Barba

University of Salerno

Anette Larsson

Chalmers, Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Applied Chemistry

Computer Aided Chemical Engineering

1570-7946 (ISSN)

Vol. 42 357-383
978-044463964-6 (ISBN)

Subject Categories

Applied Mechanics

Probability Theory and Statistics

Control Engineering

Areas of Advance

Production

Materials Science

DOI

10.1016/B978-0-444-63964-6.00012-X

More information

Latest update

7/12/2024