Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
11
Multiscale computational analysis of degradable
polymers
Paolo Zunino, Simone Vesentini, Azzurra Porpora, Joao S. Soares,
Alfonso Gautieri, and Alberto Redaelli
Abstract.
Degradable materials have found a wide variety of applications in the
biomedical field ranging from sutures, pins and screws for orthopedic surgery, local
drug delivery, tissue engineering scaffolds, and endovascular stents. Polymer degra-
dation is the irreversible chain scission process that breaks polymer chains down to
oligomers and, finally, to monomers. These changes, which take place at the molecu-
lar scale, propagate through the space/time scales and not only affect the capacity of
the polymer to release drugs, bu also hamper the overall mechanical behaviour of the
device, whose spatial scale is denoted as macroscale. A bottom-up multiscale anal-
ysis is applied to model the degradation mechanism which takes place in PLA ma-
trices. The macroscale model is based on diffusion-reaction equations for hydrolytic
polymer degradation and erosion while the microscale model is based on atomistic
Paolo Zunino ( )
MOX, Department of Mathematics, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
e-mail: paolo.zunino@polimi.it
Simone Vesentini
Department of Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
e-mail: simone.vesentini@polimi.it
Azzurra Porpora
MOX, Department of Mathematics, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
e-mail: azzurra.porpora@mail.polimi.it
Joao S. Soares
CEMAT - Center for Mathematics and its Applications, Deparment of Mathematics, Instituto Su-
perior Tecnico/UTL, Portugal
e-mail: joao.soares@math.ist.utl.pt
Alfonso Gautieri
Department of Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
e-mail: alfonso.gautieri@polimi.it
Alberto Redaelli
Department of Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
e-mail: alberto.redaelli@polimi.it
