Computational Design of Biomimetic Gels with Properties of Human Tissues

The effective design of body armor requires the use of biomimicking materials that accurately and robustly reproduce the characteristic mechanical behavior of human tissues. The mechanical performance of the soft tissues is determined by their viscoelastic properties and for this reason the optimal soft tissue surrogate must viscoelastically mimic the original tissue. One traditional tissue surrogate material is a water-based gelatin gel that has poor environmental stability and limited tailorability. Gel systems based on self-assembled, amphiphilic ABA triblock copolymers have similar properties to the gelatin system, forming the stable, spatially extended networks with a tunable viscoelastic behavior. In the present work, we have developed a systematic way to evaluate the viscoelastic properties of the biomimetic gels to control their mechanical properties. We have validated our approach using experimental data and demonstrated that our simulation results are in good qualitative agreement with the experimental data. The structure-property relationships found from the mesoscale simulation allows us to control mechanical properties of these gels in order to mimic a wide range of soft tissues. The viscoelastic properties have been calculated employing a nonequilibrium oscillatory shear technique used with the Dissipative Particle Dynamics method (DPD).