Traction-separation law parameters for the description of age-related changes in the delamination strength of the human descending thoracic aorta

Aortic dissection is a life-threatening disease that consists in the development of a tear in the wall of the aorta. The initial tear propagates as a discontinuity leading to separation within the aortic wall, which can result in the creation of a so-called false lumen. A fatal threat occurs if the rupture extends through the whole thickness of the aortic wall, as blood may then leak. It is generally accepted that the dissection, which can sometime extend along the entire length of the aorta, propagates via a delamination mechanism. The aim of the present paper is to provide experimentally validated parameters of a mathematical model for the description of the wall’s cohesion. A model of the peeling experiment was built in Abaqus. The delamination interface was described by a piecewise linear traction-separation law. The bulk behavior of the aorta was assumed to be nonlinearly elastic, anisotropic, and incompressible. Our simulations resulted in estimates of the material parameters for the traction-separation law of the human descending thoracic aorta, which were obtained by minimizing the differences between the FEM predictions and the delamination force given by the regression of the peeling experiments. The results show that the stress at damage initiation, T_c, should be understood as an age-dependent quantity, and under the assumptions of our model this dependence can be expressed by linear regression as Tc =  − 13.03·10⁻⁴·Age + 0.2485 if the crack front advances in the axial direction, and Tc =  − 7.58·10⁻⁴·Age + 0.1897 if the crack front advances in the direction of the aortic circumference (T_c [MPa], Age [years]). Other model parameters were the stiffness K and the separation at failure, δ_f–δ_c (K = 0.5 MPa/mm, δ_f–δ_c = 0.1 mm). The material parameters provided by our study can be used in numerical simulations of the biomechanics of dissection propagation through the aorta especially when age-associated phenomena are studied.