Hydrogels are soft, highly absorbent porous materials which are commonly used in pharmaceutical applications such as in soft contact lenses, drug delivery and wound healing. They are commonly modelled as hyperelastic materials with an additional chemical force driving the influx of water into the gel. In this talk, I will show how taking the “osmosis-dominated limit” (i.e. the regime where chemical forces dominate over elastic, which is the relevant limit for most commonly used hydrogels) can simplify the PDEs governing hydrogel dynamics. In the linear case, I will show the swelling problem can be entirely decoupled from the solid mechanics problem. In the nonlinear case, I will show the coupling is sufficiently weak as to enable a simplified solution procedure by finite element methods.
