Assessing the Structural Performance of Biodegradable Capsules

Abstract

Biodegradable materials pose challenges over all aspects of computational mechanics. In this study, the focus is on the resulting domain uncertainty. Model structures or devices are shells of revolution subject to random variation of the outer surface. The novelty of the proposed computational approach is the possibility to restrict the variation to specific parts of the structure using a posteriori filtering, which is applied to the random process whose realisations are the profiles of the shells. The dimensionally reduced stochastic elasticity problems are solved using a collocation method where every realisation is discretised separately. The collocation scheme is validated against standard Monte Carlo. The reliability of the simulations is further confirmed via a posteriori error estimates that are computed using the same collocation scheme. The quantities of interest on the nominal domain are the expected displacement fields and their variances.

Keywords

• uncertain domain
• biodegradable
• stochastic finite elements
• shell of revolution