Polymer gels belong to the realm of
soft active materials as they are capable of
responding to a non-mechanical stimulus – the
permeation of a solvent – with a mechanical
action – a volume change, thanks to the coupling
between different physics. This mechanism of
coupling can be exploited in a wide range of
applications, including biomedical devices,
making crucial the understanding of the
dynamics of these systems. To this aim, we
develop a nonlinear multiphysics theory and
solve numerically the resulting model using the
finite element method.
