Thermo-viscoelastic analysis of biological tissue during hyperthermia treatment

Abstract

Although viscoelastic properties of biological tissue has been reported in many articles, no effort has been made to investigate the coupled thermal and mechanical behavior of biological tissue based on the viscoelastic theory. This provides us a motivation to study the transient thermoelastic coupling response in the context of generalized thermo-viscoelastic model. The dual phase lag thermo-viscoelastic model is established to capture the micro-scale responses of biological tissue. The governing equations are solved by Laplace transformation. The effects of relaxation times and viscoelastic property on the responses of the tumor and normal tissues are discussed and illustrated graphically. According to the numerical results, we can obtain (1) the viscoelastic parameter has a significant effect on the distributions of displacement and stress; (2) the lagging thermo-viscoelastic responses depend not only on the ratio of τt/τq, but also on the absolute values of τt and τq.