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Marcello Vasta

Publications and source records attributed to Marcello Vasta.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

The Remodeling of Fiber Distributions in Biological Tissues: Rotation without Rotation

Collagen remodeling in living tissues exhibits anisotropic orientation patterns commonly described by Von Mises distributions, yet the physical origin of such nonequilibrium organization remains unresolved. In the present work, we demonstrate analytically that the combined action of Malthusian growth dynamics and the introduction of linear relations governing mechanical remodeling naturally gives rise to generalized bimodal Von Mises distributions as emergent states of living matter. The theory reveals a {\it rotation without rotation} mechanism, in which fibers progressively reorient in the absence of angular mechanical coupling via selective deposition and removal along preferred directions. The resulting analytical solutions quantitatively reproduce experimentally observed distributions and establish a direct mechanobiological origin for directional statistics in biological tissues. By interpreting the evolving normalized fiber density as a probability distribution function, we formulate a dynamical Shannon entropy framework that captures the temporal emergence of microstructural organization. The theory further yields closed-form expressions for the drift of the associated Fokker--Planck equation, enabling the corresponding stochastic differential equation to be derived, thus revealing that tissue remodeling is the collective outcome of noisy single-fiber dynamics. These results establish a minimal theoretical framework that connects biomechanics, stochastic processes, and nonequilibrium statistical organization in living matter.

cond-mat.soft

Multifield asymptotic homogenization scheme for periodic Cauchy materials in non-standard thermoelasticity

This article presents a multifield asymptotic homogenization scheme for the analysis of Bloch wave propagation in non-standard thermoelastic periodic materials, leveraging on the Green-Linsdsay theory that accounts for two relaxation times. The procedure involves several steps. Firstly, an asymptotic expansion of the micro-fields is performed, considering the characteristic size of the microstructure. By utilizing the derived microscale field equations and asymptotic expansions, a series of recursive differential problems are solved within the repetitive unit cell Q. These problems are then expressed in terms of perturbation functions, which incorporate the material's geometric, physical, and mechanical properties, as well as the microstructural heterogeneities. The down-scaling relation, which connects the microscopic and macroscopic fields along with their gradients through the perturbation functions, is then established in a consistent manner. Subsequently, the average field equations of infinite order are obtained by substituting the down-scaling relation into the microscale field equations. To solve these average field equations, an asymptotic expansion of the macroscopic fields is performed based on the microstructural size, resulting in a sequence of macroscopic recursive problems. To illustrate the methodology, a bi-phase layered material is introduced as an example. The dispersion curves obtained from the non-local homogenization scheme are compared with those obtained from the Floquet-Bloch theory. This analysis helps validate the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed approach in predicting the wave propagation behavior in the considered non-standard thermoelastic periodic materials.

math-ph

A numerical model of the human cornea accounting for the fiber-distributed collagen microstructure

We present a fiber-distributed model of the reinforcing collagen of the human cornea. The model describes the basic connections between the components of the tissue by defining an elementary block (cell) and upscaling it to the physical size of the cornea. The cell is defined by two sets of collagen fibrils running in sub-orthogonal directions, characterized by a random distribution of the spatial orientation and connected by chemical bonds of two kinds. The bonds of the first kind describe the lamellar crosslinks, forming the ribbon-like lamellae; while the bonds of the second kind describe the stacking crosslinks, piling up the lamellae to form the structure of the stroma. The spatial replication of the cell produces a truss structure with a considerable number of degrees of freedom. The statistical characterization of the collagen fibrils leads to a mechanical model that reacts to the action of the deterministic intraocular pressure with a stochastic distribution of the displacements, here characterized by their mean value and variance. The strategy to address the solution of the heavy resulting numerical problem is to use the so-called stochastic finite element improved perturbation method combined with a fully explicit solver. Results demonstrate that the variability of the mechanical properties affects in a non-negligible manner the expected response of the structure to the physiological action.

physics.bio-ph