A finite element method for modeling surface growth and resorption of deformable solids

This work explores a continuum-mechanical model for a body simultaneously undergoing finite deformation and surface growth/resorption. This is accomplished by defining the kinematics as well as the set of material points that constitute the domain of a physical body at a given time in terms of an evolving reference configuration. The implications of spatial and temporal discretization are discussed, and an extension of the Arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian finite element method is proposed to enforce the resulting balance laws on the grown/resorbed body in two spatial dimensions. Representative numerical examples are presented to highlight the predictive capabilities of the model and the numerical properties of the proposed solution method.