Stiffening by Osmotic Swelling Constraint in Cartilage‐Like Cell Culture Scaffolds

Simulation of Osmotic Swelling by the Stochastic Immersed Boundary Method

We develop computational methods for the simulation of osmotic swelling phenomenarelevant to microscopic vesicles containing transformable solute molecules. We introduce StochasticImmersed Boundary Methods (SIBM) that can capture osmotically driven fluid transport throughsemi-permeable elastic membranes subject to thermal fluctuations. We also develop numerical meth-ods to handl...

Osmotic Swelling Behavior of Bovine Cartilage

Introduction Cartilage is a complex tissue whose extracellular matrix mainly consists of charged proteoglycan (PG) assemblies imbedded in a fibrous collagen network. PGs attract water and repel each other due to their negative charges generating a high swelling pressure. Collagens are proteins that form the fibrillar meshwork providing cartilage with its tensile strength. Cartilage extracellula...

Kinetics of swelling under constraint

Swellable elastomers are used to seal flow channels in oilfield operations. After sealing, the elastomers are constrained triaxially, and a contact load builds up between the elastomers and surrounding rigid materials. For these applications, the ability to predict the evolution of the contact load is important. This work introduces an experimental setup to measure the contact load as a functio...

Cartilage-like electrostatic stiffening of responsive cryogel scaffolds

Cartilage is a structural tissue with unique mechanical properties deriving from its electrically-charged porous structure. Traditional three-dimensional environments for the culture of cells fail to display the complex physical response displayed by the natural tissue. In this work, the reproduction of the charged environment found in cartilage is achieved using polyelectrolyte hydrogels based...

Evaluating the Functional Status of Spermatozoa in Smokers Using Hypo-osmotic Swelling Test