Constitutive framework for the modeling of damage in collagenous soft tissues with application to arterial walls

In this paper a new material model is proposed for the description of stress-softening observed in cyclic tension tests of collagenous soft tissues such as arterial walls, for applied loads beyond the physiological level. The modeling framework makes use of terms known from continuum damage mechanics and the concept of internal variables introducing a scalar-valued variable for the representation of fiber damage. A principle is given for the construction of damage models able to reflect remanent strains as a result of microscopic damage in the reinforcing collagen fiber families. Particular internal variables are defined able to capture the nature of arterial tissues that no damage occurs in the physiological loading domain. By application of this principle, specific models are derived and fitted to experimental data. Finally, their applicability in numerical simulations is shown by some representative examples where the damage distribution in arterial cross-sections is analyzed.