https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-023-03953-y
Regular Article
Circumferential buckling of a hydrogel tube emptying upon dehydration
1
Dipartimento di Architettura, Università Roma Tre, Roma, Italy
2
Dipartimento di Matematica e Fisica ‘E. De Giorgi’, Università del Salento, Lecce, Italy
3
Dipartimento di Ingegneria Strutturale e Geotecnica, Sapienza Università di Roma, Roma, Italy
Received:
6
December
2022
Accepted:
4
April
2023
Published online:
4
May
2023
A cylindrical hydrogel tube, completely submerged in water, hydrates by swelling and filling its internal cavity. When it comes back into contact with air, it dehydrates: the tube thus expels the solvent through the walls, shrinking. This dehydration process causes a depression in the tube cavity, which can lead to circumferential buckling. Here we study the occurrence of such buckling using a continuous model that combines nonlinear elasticity with Flory–Rehner theory, to take into account both the large deformations and the active behaviour of the hydrogel. In quasi-static approximation, we use the incremental deformation formalism, extended to the chemo-mechanical equations, to determine the threshold value of the enclosed volume at which buckling is triggered. This critical value is found to depend on the shell thickness, chemical potential and constitutive features. The results obtained are in good agreement with the results of the finite element simulations of the complete dynamic problem.
© The Author(s) 2023
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