Technical Papers and Presentations

The swelling behavior of human intervertebral disc is strongly influenced by chemical changes in the surrounding environment. Swelling of IVD is governed by various physical phenomena, including chemical and electric potential based transport, electrical charge balance, and swelling due to concentration difference within IVD relative to surrounding fluid. This change in geometry can be described by various physical phenomena via sets of partial differential equations. This paper describes the fully coupled solution by combining all three equations in a moving mesh domain using COMSOL Multiphysics®. The concentration of mobile ions, pH change in surrounding bio-fluid on the distributions of the concentrations of ionic species, electrical charge balance, and the expansion of the vertebral disc are investigated.