RUPTURE OF HYDROGELS

Hydrogels are soft, highly deformable materials with applications ranging from soft actuators to natural and synthetic biomaterials. The rupture of hydrogels generally involves very large deformations that can be strongly coupled to the fluid flow. In this paper, a modified J-integral (J*) is used to calculate the critical energy release rate utilizing either a critical stretch criterion or the measured overall force-extension relation for a SENT specimen of a fibrin gel, which is the primary stress-carying component of blood clots.
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