College of Science & Engineering
Twin Cities
The Barocas group works on many aspects of multiscale biomechanics with the goal of creating a "materials science of tissue." They use a code that involves two computational scales: the tissue scale, at which the material appears to be continuous, and the structural scale, at which it is recognized to be constituted of discrete, often fibrous elements, involving network models of the tissue at points corresponding to the integration points in the tissue-scale model. This approach requires millions of variables (thousands of fibers in each of thousands of microproblems), requiring high-performance resources. Fortunately, the micro-scale problems can be solved in parallel with great efficiency, making the computations tractable. The group has also recently greatly increased their work in the area of blood flow modeling, including fluid-only and fluid-structure models.
The primary focus for the next few years will be on blood vessels, in particular on aneurysms of the aorta and intracranial vessels. The work involves coupling fluid dynamics, solid mechanics, image processing, and remodeling to develop better ways to predict outcome of aneurysm disease. The researchers are also looking at fluid-structure interaction for flows in chronic aortic dissection, and are trying to develop better ways to use different imaging modalities in concert to understand soft tissue mechanics.
Research by this group was featured on the MSI website in January 2016: Using Multiscale Mechanical Modeling to Investigate Skin Responses.