Wednesday  |  Monongahela  |  11:50 AM–12:10 PM

#13512, Modeling and Mechanical Characterization of Anisotropic Behavior of Porcine Dermis

Soft biological tissues have been used in various medical, cosmetic, and biomedical research applications. A better understanding of their mechanical behavior can enable the development of potentially new approaches. Soft biological tissues exhibit a nonlinear and anisotropic behavior due to the presence of collagen fibers. The orientation, distribution, and degree of the dispersion of these fibers significantly influence the mechanical behavior of the tissue. Accordingly, to quantify the mechanical behavior of soft tissues, it is essential to characterize the spatial distribution which includes the orientation and dispersion of collagen fibers within the isotropic matrix known as the ground substance. To this end, a combined experimental and modeling investigation into the anisotropic behavior of a representative soft tissue (porcine skin) was carried out. Fiber orientations were obtained from histological analysis of the porcine dermis samples. This data was used in a pi-periodic von-Mises distribution density function to obtain the mean direction and dispersion of the two major fiber families. Tensile samples from the same porcine dermis region were also extracted. The tensile response in three different orientations was measured. A new nonlinear anisotropic constitutive model was developed for soft tissue. The experimental results from two different orientations were used to calibrate the model. The calibrated model was then used to predict the mechanical response of the tissue in the third orientation. The resulting prediction matched the experimental data reasonably well.

Suman Jaiswal   New Jersey Institute of Technology
Shawn Chester   New Jersey Institute of Technology
Samuel Lieber   New Jersey Institute of Technology
Siva Nadimpalli   Michigan State University