Growth and dissipation in biological tissues

This paper provides a unified mathematical framework so as to study the growth of biological tissues on an energetic basis. All the contributions to growth of solute chemicals and nutrients are here resumed in one scalar descriptor, the biochemical energy of the system. The free energy of the system accounts for both strain and biochemical storage. The exploitation of a dissipation inequality by standard means provides admissible couplings between growth, tension and energy. Specific admissible constitutive equations lead back, in some cases, to classical models.