A variational RVE-based multiscale poromechanical formulation applied to soft biological tissues under large deformations

Investigations on micromechanics of soft biological tissues may lead to significant contributions within the fields of mechanobiology and tissue engineering. Multiscale models can be interesting numerical tools, since they may provide important insights on the micromechanics of these tissues. Due to the several multiphysics phenomena observed in soft biological tissues, the coupling between the fluid transport throughout the solid phases is one of major interest. In this regard, poromechanical models are widely used to represent the fluid diffusion through a deformable porous media. Motivated by these facts, this work presents an extension of the variational single-field multiscale formulation considering poromechanical phases at finite strain aiming at applications to soft biological tissues. To verify the suitability of the proposed formulation, numerical examples are compared with direct numerical simulations. In this case, two states are considered: an undrained and a drained condition. The results point out that the minimally constrained boundary condition for the fluid flow seems to properly represent only an undrained condition. However, for the drained one, proper multiscale boundary conditions must be developed.