Biomechanics
Additional aspects of biotribology include analysis of subsurface damage resulting from two surfaces coming in contact during motion, i.e. rubbing against each other, such as in the evaluation of tissue-engineered cartilage.
Common areas of investigation are animal locomotion and feeding, as these have strong connections to the organism's fitness and impose high mechanical demands.
Locomotion requires energy to overcome friction, drag, inertia, and gravity, though which factor predominates varies with environment.
Comparative biomechanics is often applied in medicine (with regards to common model organisms such as mice and rats) as well as in biomimetics, which looks to nature for solutions to engineering problems.
Mechanical modeling using finite element analysis has been used to interpret the experimental observation of plant cell growth to understand how they differentiate, for instance.
One of the main advantages of computational biomechanics lies in its ability to determine the endo-anatomical response of an anatomy, without being subject to ethical restrictions.
[9] This has led finite element modeling (or other discretization techniques) to the point of becoming ubiquitous in several fields of biomechanics while several projects have even adopted an open source philosophy (e.g., BioSpine).
In this case, numerical (discretization) methods are used to compute, as fast as possible, a system's response to boundary conditions such as forces, heat and mass transfer, and electrical and magnetic stimuli.
Mechanical deformation of hard tissues (like wood, shell and bone) may be analysed with the theory of linear elasticity.
On the other hand, soft tissues (like skin, tendon, muscle, and cartilage) usually undergo large deformations, and thus, their analysis relies on the finite strain theory and computer simulations.
[12] Application of biomechanics for plants ranges from studying the resilience of crops to environmental stress[13] to development and morphogenesis at cell and tissue scale, overlapping with mechanobiology.
It focuses on the application of the scientific principles of mechanical physics to understand movements of action of human bodies and sports implements such as cricket bat, hockey stick and javelin etc.
[14] Biomechanics in sports can be stated as the body's muscular, joint, and skeletal actions while executing a given task, skill, or technique.
[16] Vascular system in the human body is the main component that is supposed to maintain pressure and allow for blood flow and chemical exchanges.
This evolution directly follows the chemical and mechanical environment in which the tissues are immersed like Wall Shear Stress or biochemical signaling.
The emerging field of immunomechanics focuses on characterising mechanical properties of the immune cells and their functional relevance.
[19] In another work, On the Parts of Animals, he provided an accurate description of how the ureter uses peristalsis to carry urine from the kidneys to the bladder.
Galen (129 AD-210 AD), physician to Marcus Aurelius, wrote his famous work, On the Function of the Parts (about the human body).
He analyzed muscle forces as acting along lines connecting origins and insertions, and studied joint function.
[20] Galileo Galilei, the father of mechanics and part time biomechanic was born 21 years after the death of Copernicus.
[20] Influenced by the work of Galileo, whom he personally knew, he had an intuitive understanding of static equilibrium in various joints of the human body well before Newton published the laws of motion.
During the same period, the engineering mechanics of materials began to flourish in France and Germany under the demands of the Industrial Revolution.
This led to the rebirth of bone biomechanics when the railroad engineer Karl Culmann and the anatomist Hermann von Meyer compared the stress patterns in a human femur with those in a similarly shaped crane.
[23] The study of biomechanics ranges from the inner workings of a cell to the movement and development of limbs, to the mechanical properties of soft tissue,[7] and bones.
Some simple examples of biomechanics research include the investigation of the forces that act on limbs, the aerodynamics of bird and insect flight, the hydrodynamics of swimming in fish, and locomotion in general across all forms of life, from individual cells to whole organisms.
Research is done in an iterative process of hypothesis and verification, including several steps of modeling, computer simulation and experimental measurements.
