Fig. 5.

a In the stochastic network construction with a collagen concentration of $0.8$ mg/ml in a cube of edge length $245\mu \text{m}$, the energy-type objective function according to Eq. (11) is reduced during simulated annealing (in the studied range even superquadratically) by multiple orders of magnitude; b this optimization process yields RVEs with a desired microstructure; c the effective Young’s moduli at strains $<1\%$ of RVEs constructed this way match well with the ones observed in experiments (Alcaraz et al. 2011; Miroshnikova et al. 2011; Joshi et al. 2018)