Crack Propagation Versus Fiber Alignment in Collagen Gels: Experiments and Multiscale Simulation

It is well known that the organization of the fibers constituting a collagenous tissue can affect its failure behavior. Less clear is how that effect can be described computationally so as to predict the failure of a native or engineered tissue under the complex loading conditions that can occur in vivo. Toward the goal of a general predictive strategy, we applied our multiscale model of collagen gel mechanics to the failure of a double-notched gel under tension, comparing the results for aligned and isotropic samples. In both computational and laboratory experiments, we found that the aligned gels were more likely to fail by connecting the two notches than the isotropic gels. For example, when the initial notches were 30% of the sample width (normalized tip-to-edge distance = 0.7), the normalized tip-to-tip distance at which the transition occurred from between-notch failure to across-sample failure shifted from 0.6 to 1.0. When the model predictions for the type of failure event (between the two notches versus across the sample width) were compared to the experimental results, the two were found to be strongly covariant by Fisher’s exact test (p < 0.05) for both the aligned and isotropic gels with no fitting parameters. Although the double-notch system is idealized, and the collagen gel system is simpler than a true tissue, it presents a simple model system for studying failure of anisotropic tissues in a controlled setting. The success of the computational model suggests that the multiscale approach, in which the structural complexity is incorporated via changes in the model networks rather than via changes to a constitutive equation, has the potential to predict tissue failure under a wide range of conditions.