  The simulation of growth processes within soft biological tissues is of
utmost importance for many applications in the medical sector. Within this
contribution we propose a new macroscopic approach fro modelling stress-driven
volumetric growth occurring in soft tissues. Instead of using the standard
approach of a-priori defining the structure of the growth tensor, we postulate
the existance of a general growth potential. Such a potential describes all
eligable homeostatic stress states that can ultimately be reached as a result
of the growth process. Making use of well established methods from
visco-plasticity, the evolution of the growth related right Cauchy-Green tensor
is subsequently defined as a time dependent associative evolution law with
respect to the introduced potential. This approach naturally leads to a
formulation that is able to cover both, isotropic and anisotropic growth
related changes in geometry. It furthermore allows the model to flexibly adapt
to changing boundary and loading conditions. Besides the theoretical
development, we also describe the algorithmic implementation and furthermore
compare the newly derived model with a standard formulation of isotropic
growth.
