We study the growth of a tissue construct in a perfusion bioreactor, focussing on its response to the mechanical environment. The bioreactor system is modelled as a two-dimensional channel containing a tissue construct through which a flow of culture medium is driven. We employ a multiphase formulation of the type presented by G. Lemon, J. King, H. Byrne, O. Jensen and K. Shakesheff in their study (Multiphase modelling of tissue growth using the theory of mixtures. J. Math. Biol. 52(2), 2006, 571–594) restricted to two interacting fluid phases, representing a cell population (and attendant extracellular matrix) and a culture medium, and employ the simplifying limit of large interphase viscous drag after S. Franks in her study (Mathematical Modelling of Tumour Growth and Stability. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Nottingham, UK, 2002) and S. Franks and J. King in their study (Interactions between a uniformly proliferating tumour and its surrounding: Uniform material properties. Math. Med. Biol. 20, 2003, 47–89).

The novel aspects of this study are: (i) the investigation of the effect of an imposed flow on the growth of the tissue construct, and (ii) the inclusion of a mechanotransduction mechanism regulating the response of the cells to the local mechanical environment. Specifically, we consider the response of the cells to their local density and the culture medium pressure. As such, this study forms the first step towards a general multiphase formulation that incorporates the effect of mechanotransduction on the growth and morphology of a tissue construct.

The model is analysed using analytic and numerical techniques, the results of which illustrate the potential use of the model to predict the dominant regulatory stimuli in a cell population.

We deal with a variational approach to the inverse crack problem, that is the detection and reconstruction of cracks, and other defects, inside a conducting body by performing boundary measurements of current and voltage type. We formulate such an inverse problem in a free-discontinuity problems framework and propose a novel method for the numerical reconstruction of the cracks by the available boundary data. The proposed method is amenable to numerical computations and it is justified by a convergence analysis, as the error on the measurements goes to zero. We further notice that we use the Γ-convergence approximation of the Mumford–Shah functional due to Ambrosio and Tortorelli as the required regularization term.

We prove the existence and uniqueness of pulsating waves for the motion by mean curvature of an n-dimensional hypersurface in an inhomogeneous medium, represented by a periodic forcing. The main difficulty is caused by the degeneracy of the equation and the fact the forcing is allowed to change sign. Under the assumption of weak inhomogeneity, we obtain uniform oscillation and gradient bounds so that the evolving surface can be written as a graph over a reference hyperplane. The existence of an effective speed of propagation is established for any normal direction. We further prove the Lipschitz continuity of the speed with respect to the normal and various stability properties of the pulsating wave. The results are related to the homogenisation of mean curvature flow with forcing.

It is generally believed that in order to solve initial value problems using Lie symmetry methods, the initial condition needs to be left invariant by the infinitesimal symmetry generator that admits the invariant solution. This is not so. In this paper we incorporate the imposed initial value as a side condition to find ‘infinitesimals’ from which solutions satisfying the initial value can be recovered, along with the corresponding symmetry generator.

In this paper we consider a 2π-periodic and two-dimensional Hele-Shaw flow describing the motion of a viscous, incompressible fluid. The free surface is moving under the influence of surface tension and gravity. The motion of the fluid is modelled using a modified version of Darcy's law for Stokesian fluids. The bottom of the cell is assumed to be impermeable. We prove the existence of a unique classical solution for a domain which is a small perturbation of a cylinder. Moreover, we identify the equilibria of the flow and study their stability.