Multiphysics Modeling of Swelling Gels

Polymer gels belong to the realm of soft active materials as they are capable of responding to a non-mechanical stimulus – the permeation of a solvent – with a mechanical action – a volume change, thanks to the coupling between different physics. This mechanism of coupling can be exploited in a wide range of applications, including biomedical devices, making crucial the understanding of the dynamics of these systems. To this aim, we develop a nonlinear multiphysics theory and solve numerically the resulting model using the finite element method.