09/2 Multiscale particle simulations of soft tissues

		Particle simulation of virtual cutting: A multiscale approach will significantly improve the accuracy and computational effort of this simulation.

Particle methods are a flexible computational tool and highly suitable for the simulation of soft tissue as it does not require a sophisticated and expensive gridding of the domain, it allows for efficient simulations of cutting procedures and is inherently adaptive. Currently a major drawback of the method is the requirement of a uniform resolution for the particle representation. Although particle methods are inherently adaptive their efficiency will be enhanced by developing multiresolution and multiphysics particle methods. The accuracy of smooth particle methods with overlapping cores is determined by the core size of the associated particle kernels. For computational efficiency this core size needs to be spatially variable in order to discretise adequately different parts of the domain in particular for cases where large gradients (such as during cutting) or significant deformations are observed and at the boundaries involving fluid-solid interactions. Multiscale simulations using particle methods are a relatively new research field where our group is involved in the state-of-the-art work in the context of fluid flow problems. We will apply this knowledge to tissue simulations using linear and non-linear material models.