The swelling and shrinkage of biological tissues are modelled by a four-component mixture theory in which a deformable and charged porous medium is saturated with a fluid with dissolved ions. Four components are defined: solid, liquid, cations and anions. The aim of this paper is the construction of the Lagrangian model of the four-component system. It is shown that, with the choice of Lagrangian description of the solid skeleton, the motion of the other components can be described in terms of Lagrangian initial system of the solid skeleton as well. Such an approach has a particularly important bearing on computer-aided calculations. Balance laws are derived for each component and for the whole mixture. In cooperation of the second law of thermodynamics, the constitutive equations are given. This theory results in a coupled system of nonlinear parabolic differential equations together with an algebraic constraint for electroneutrality. In this model, it is desirable to obtain an accurate approximation of the fluid flow and ions flow. Such an accurate approximation can be determined by the mixed finite element method. Part II is devoted to this task.

The swelling and shrinkage of biological tissues are modelled by a four-component mixture theory [J.M. Huyghe and J.D. Janssen, Int. J. Engng. Sci.35 (1997) 793–802; K. Malakpoor, E.F. Kaasschieter and J.M. Huyghe, Mathematical modelling and numerical solution of swelling of cartilaginous tissues. Part I: Modeling of incompressible charged porous media.ESAIM: M2AN41 (2007) 661–678]. This theory results in a coupled system of nonlinear parabolic differential equations together with an algebraic constraint for electroneutrality. In this model, it is desirable to obtain accurate approximations of the fluid flow and ions flow. Such accurate approximations can be determined by the mixed finite element method. The solid displacement, fluid and ions flow and electro-chemical potentials are taken as degrees of freedom. In this article the lowest-order mixed method is discussed. This results into a first-order nonlinear algebraic equation with an indefinite coefficient matrix. The hybridization technique is then used to reduce the list of degrees of freedom and to speed up the numerical computation. The mixed hybrid finite element method is then validated for small deformations using the analytical solutions for one-dimensional confined consolidation and swelling. Two-dimensional results are shown in a swelling cylindrical hydrogel sample.

The discretisation of the Oseen problem by finite element methods may sufferin general from two shortcomings. First, the discrete inf-sup (Babuška-Brezzi)condition can be violated. Second, spurious oscillationsoccur due to the dominating convection. One way to overcome bothdifficulties is the use of local projection techniques. Studying the local projection method in an abstract setting, we show that the fulfilment of a local inf-sup condition between approximation andprojection spaces allows to construct an interpolation with additional orthogonality properties. Based on this special interpolation, optimal a-priori error estimates are shown with error constants independent of the Reynolds number. Applying the general theory,we extend the results of Braack and Burman for the standard two-level versionof the local projection stabilisation to discretisations of arbitrary order onsimplices, quadrilaterals, and hexahedra. Moreover, our general theory allowsto derive a novel class of local projection stabilisation by enrichment of the approximation spaces. This class of stabilised schemes uses approximation and projection spaces defined on the same mesh and leads tomuch more compact stencils than in the two-level approach. Finally, on simplices, the spectral equivalence of the stabilising terms of the local projection method and the subgrid modelling introduced by Guermond is shown. This clarifies the relation of the local projection stabilisation to the variational multiscaleapproach.

We consider the coupling between three-dimensional(3D) and one-dimensional (1D) fluid-structure interaction (FSI) models describing blood flow inside compliant vessels. The 1D model is a hyperbolicsystem of partial differential equations.The 3D model consists of the Navier-Stokes equationsfor incompressible Newtonian fluids coupled with a model for the vessel wall dynamics. A non standard formulationfor the Navier-Stokes equations is adopted tohave suitable boundary conditions for the couplingof the models. With this we derive an energy estimatefor the fully 3D-1D FSI coupling. We consider several possiblemodels for the mechanics of the vessel wall in the 3D problemand show how the 3D-1D coupling depends on them.Several comparative numerical tests illustrating the coupling are presented.

This paper deals with the mortar spectral element discretization of two equivalent problems, the Laplace equation and the Darcy system, in a domain which corresponds to a nonhomogeneous anisotropic medium. The numerical analysis of the discretization leads to optimal error estimates and the numerical experiments that we present enable us to verify its efficiency.