Thermomechanical response of porous biological tissue based on local thermal non-equilibrium

Abstract

Understanding of heat transfer and related thermomechanical interaction in biological tissue is very important to clinical applications. It is quite natural to treat the living tissue as a porous medium, such as the living tissue in the presence of blood. Based on a non-equilibrium heat transfer model, the thermomechanical response of porous biological tissue exposed to an instantaneous thermal shock is investigated in this work. The governing equations are established based on local thermal non-equilibrium model in the context of the generalized thermoelastic theory and solved by time-domain finite-element method. The effect of porosity coefficient on the thermal-mechanical response of the porous tissue is studied and illustrated graphically. Comparisons are made between the proposed results and those from the local thermal equilibrium models to reveal the difference of these two models in terms of thermoelastic response.