Unit micro-cell models with different architectures were designed to simulate the degradation process and chemical damage behavior of degradable polymers under bulk erosion. The pores in the micro-cell models were introduced to mimic the state of rapid water diffusion into the polymers under bulk erosion, while three different arrangements of pores were considered to investigate their effects on the degradation rate of different polymers with the same molecular weight. Different porosity levels were also used to study the degradation responses of the polymers having different molecular weights. A heat and mass transfer analogy was adopted to enable the analysis to be run on a general purpose finite element (FE) code. In the present work, a finite element software package ABAQUS incorporated with a user-defined material subroutine was used to perform the analysis, in which a heat transfer function was utilized to simulate Fickian mass diffusion for the polymers through analogy. With the proposed method, the effects of chemical damage on the mechanical properties of the degradable polymers under bulk erosion could be predicted and the predicted trend of the mass loss of the polymers followed experimental results obtained from the open literature. (c) 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci., 2013