Determination of displacement field in hyperelastic biological tissues

Abstract

The characterization of mechanical properties in materials with nonlinear behaviour brings new challenges to mechanical engineering, both in the development of new experimental techniques such as the implementation of new numerical algorithms. In the last decades has been made a serious commitment in research of biological tissues, these materials have a strongly nonlinear behaviour and it is difficult to characterize it. In the present work it is done a study of mechanical behaviour in the hyperelastic biological tissues, for that was used a field experimental technique called Digital Image Correlation, this technique is relatively new and allows the characterization of displacement field with high resolution and without contact. The numerical simulations were performed using a commercial finite element program, ANSYS ®, which uses experimental data from tensile tests of hyperelastic human vaginal tissue. In numerical simulation was implemented some of the bestknown constitutive models in the study of hyperelastic materials: Mooney-Rivlin, Yeoh and Ogden. The results demonstrated the potential of these techniques to analyze the mechanical behavior of hyperelastic materials, however, it was verified the need a further deepening study of these techniques to apply them to this kind of materials.