*2.7. Computational Studies*

SimTissue, a tissue simulator, was developed specifically for furnish management and optimization by FibEnTech-UBI members, in the scope of Project InPaCTus. This tissue simulator was used to compare different end-use final tissue properties and to access them for the different formulations to those performed experimentally [24].

A 3D fiber-based computational simulator was used to model the tissue structures as planar random networks. This simulator is open-source software, and the code is available on GitHub (https://github.com/eduardotrincaoconceicao/voxelfiber, accessed on April 2021). A more detailed description of this 3D simulator can be found in Conceição et al. and Curto et al. [32,33]. The fibers are represented by a voxel chain and modeled according to fiber dimensions and properties such as the fiber length and width ratio, flexibility, fiber wall thickness and lumen dimensions [34]. The structural properties were obtained following this computational study and the resulting 3D computational structures. The computational studies were performed using MATLAB® (R 2020a, 9.8.0.1323502, MathWorks, Natick, MA, USA).
