Modeling of Rheological Object with Square or Cubic Finite Element

Rheological object, such as various food products and biological tissues, has both elastic and plastic properties. Modeling of rheological object has not been studied frequently comparing with the modeling of elastic one. Our previously developed FE models of rheological objects were based on triangular or tetrahedra finite elements. In this paper, the FE model of rheological object formulated with square (2D) or cubic (3D) finite elements were presented. At first, the 2D FE model with square elements was formulated and was then extended to 3D case with cubic elements. The developed FE models were then utilized to simulate regular shaped objects and computation cost and simulation results were compared with the results from triangularor tetrahedrabased models. We found that the FE model with square or cubic elements works as well as the model based on triangular or tetrahedra elements but can save computation cost with a speed-up ratio of about 30% in 2D or 50% in 3D cases.