Volumetric Growth of Thermoelastic Materials and Mixtures

The proteoglycan and collagen constituents of cartilage serve distinct mechanical roles. Changes to the mechanical loading conditions during cartilage growth lead to changes in the concentrations of these molecules and, consequently, the mechanical properties. The main aim of this paper is to present a theory that can describe the mechanical aspects of cartilage growth. The model for cartilage growth is based on a general thermomechanical theory for a mixture of an arbitrary number of growing elastic constituents and an inviscid fluid. Our development of a growth mixture theory is accomplished in two steps. First, the thermodynamics of growing elastic materials are considered. The resulting theory of growing thermoelastic materials is extended to continuum mixture theory. Using this general growth mixture theory, we then propose a cartilage growth model that includes two special types of internal constraints that are relevant to cartilage.