Modeling of Damage, Growth, and Remodeling in Arterial Walls by Professor Daniel Balzani

ABSTRACT: The computational simulation of diseased arteries is of high importance with respect to an optimization of medical treatment and clinical diagnosis. The physiological and the supra-physiological loading situations are particularly interesting in atherosclerotic arteries because here it is often difficult for medical doctors to estimate if surgical intervention is required or not. Then, reliable computational prediction of the mechanical fields inside the artery, such as transmural stress or damage distribution, can provide a tool for the improvement of medical treatment. These numerical calculations require models describing reliably the material behavior, which is anisotropic, incompressible, nonlinear, and in case of supra-physiological loading characterized by pronounced softening hysteresis at large strains. In addition to this, arterial tissues change and adapt to their mechanical environment, which results in e.g. distributed fiber orientations through the wall and residual stresses. Thereby, these processes play an important role for the simulation of stress states. In the talk, different aspects regarding a predictive material modeling are discussed and exemplary simulations of patient-specific arteries are presented.

BIOSKETCH: Daniel Balzani is Full-Professor of Continuum Mechanics at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. Before he had the Open-Topic Full-Professorship of Mechanics at the Technical University Dresden from 2014 until 2017. He graduated as civil engineer at the University of Duisburg-Essen in 2003 and received his doctoral degree from the Technical University Darmstadt in 2006. Daniel Balzani has been postdoctoral researcher in Essen until 2009, when he moved to Hannover to serve as substitute Professor for one year. Then he joined the group of Michael Ortiz at Caltech in Pasadena, USA, as a research fellow for 7 months and returned to Essen as Senior Researcher, where he finished his habilitation in 2012. During his scientific career, Daniel Balzani received several awards, such as the M.I.T.-fellowship award in 2005, the Richard von Mises Price in 2009 (from the International Association of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics GAMM e.V.), the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Award in 2010 (from the German Science Foundation DFG), or the Baedeker Award in 2013. His current research interests include the computer simulation and modeling of micro-heterogeneous materials, in particular multiphase steels, hard metals, soft biological tissues, textile membranes, and reinforced concrete. His focus is on the development of mathematically sound continuum mechanical formulations for elasticity, anisotropy, damage, growth, remodeling, and elasto-plasticity at large strains. Further focus is on deriving robust and efficient numerical methods for the (multiscale) simulation of complex materials including uncertainties.

Date/Time:
Date(s) - Aug 07, 2019
11:00 am - 12:00 pm

Location:
37-124 Engineering IV
420 Westwood Plaza Los Angeles CA