Abstract Arterial tissue delamination, manifested as the fracture failure between arterial layers, is an important process of the atherosclerotic plaque rupture, leading to potential life-threatening clinical consequences. Numerous models have been used to characterize the arterial tissue delamination fracture failure. However, only a few have investigated the effect of cohesive zone model (CZM) shapes on predicting the delamination behavior of the arterial wall. In this study, four types of CZMs (triangular, trapezoidal, linear–exponential, and exponential–linear) were investigated to compare their prediction of the arterial wall fracture failure. The Holzapfel–Gasser–Ogden (HGO) model was adopted for modeling the mechanical behavior of the aortic bulk material. The CZMs optimized during the comparison of the aortic media delamination simulations were also used to perform the comparative study of the mouse plaque delamination and human fibrous cap delamination. The results show that: (1) the numerical predicted the relationships of force–displacement in the delamination behaviors based on the triangular, trapezoidal, linear–exponential, and exponential–linear CZMs match well with the experimental measurements. (2) The traction–separation relationship results simulated by the four types of CZMs could react well as the corresponding CZM shapes. (3) The predicted load–load point displacement curves using the triangular and exponential–linear CZMs are in good agreement with the experimental data, relative to the other two shapes of CZMs. All these provide a new method combined with the factor of shape in the cohesive models to simulate the crack propagation behaviors and can capture the arterial tissue failure response well.

中文翻译：

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预测动脉壁分层断裂行为的内聚区模型的比较研究

摘要 动脉组织分层，表现为动脉层间断裂失败，是动脉粥样硬化斑块破裂的重要过程，可能导致危及生命的临床后果。许多模型已被用于表征动脉组织分层骨折失败。然而，只有少数研究了内聚区模型 (CZM) 形状对预测动脉壁分层行为的影响。在这项研究中，研究了四种类型的 CZM（三角形、梯形、线性指数和指数线性），以比较它们对动脉壁断裂失败的预测。Holzapfel-Gasser-Ogden (HGO) 模型用于模拟主动脉块材料的机械行为。在比较主动脉中层分层模拟过程中优化的 CZM 也用于对小鼠斑块分层和人纤维帽分层进行比较研究。结果表明：（1）基于三角形、梯形、线性-指数和指数-线性CZMs的数值预测分层行为中力-位移的关系与实验测量结果匹配良好。(2)四种CZMs模拟的牵引-分离关系结果与相应的CZM形状反应良好。(3) 相对于其他两种形状的 CZM，使用三角形和指数-线性 CZM 预测的载荷-载荷点位移曲线与实验数据非常吻合。