Parameshwaran Pasupathy, a fourth year Ph.D. student won 3rd place in the student poster competition held during the Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering (MICDE) symposium at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor on March 24th, 2023. The symposium entitled, “Emerging and Future Paradigms for High Performance Computing” welcomed a distinguished group of scientists in scientific computing from around the world and included more than 60 student posters.
Paramesh is part of the Advanced Materials and Structures Laboratory and is advised by Prof. Assimina Pelegri. His poster entitled, “A Fractional Viscoelastic Model of the Axon in Brain White Matter” is an ongoing effort to develop a multi-scale computational model of brain tissue that characterizes the brain’s soft and viscous response to dynamic loads.
The research involves the development of a finite element based constitutive material model of the microstructure of the brain tissue namely, the axons and the surrounding glial cells By reducing the geometry to its basic unit of structure or a unitary cell and by positing a power-law mechanical behavior of the constituents of the unit cell, a fractional viscoelastic material model of the brain white matter is created. By subjecting the units cells to dynamic loads, homogenized fractional viscoelastic properties of the unit cells comprising of different volume fractions of axons in glial cells are obtained in each direction of loading. Thus, a framework for computationally generating the anisotropy observed in the mechanical behavior of the brain tissue is explored. Additionally, this research delves into the computational considerations for adequate representations of the unit cells and methods for improving the computational efficiency of the fractional viscoelastic model.