The effect of the collagen fibrils network on the damage behaviour of articular cartilage: a computational study

Collagen fibrils are the main composition of articular cartilage. The aim of this work is to study the influence of the collagen network on the damage behaviour of articular cartilage by employing a multiscale computation approach. For this purpose, a visco‐hyperelastic damage model based on the finite strain theory is proposed to describe the damage process of collagen fibrils. Stress and damage distributions are investigated to determine the influence of the fibril morphology on the cartilage damage. The computation results reveal that the location and magnitude of the damage in cartilage are strongly dependent on the orientation, distribution and the ratio between the primary and secondary level of the collagen fibrils.