A closed form solution for the uniaxial tension test of biological soft tissues

Abstract

This paper concerns the modeling of biological soft tissues in the framework of anisotropic hyperelasticity. A closed form solution is proposed in the special case where uniaxial unconstrained tension loading is applied to a strip modeled by Holzapfel–Gasser–Ogden's (HGO) strain energy. The classical Cardano's formula is used to calculate the solution. This solution is investigated for different values of β which represents the angle between the collagen fibers and the circumferential direction. This study allows for the understanding of the reason why a one-to-one correspondence does not exist between the principal stretch and the fourth invariant of the right Cauchy–Green deformation tensor. It is demonstrated that the relationship becomes non-bijective when β is greater than a critical angle of 54 . 73 ∘ . The HGO model is implemented into an in-house finite element program and numerical results are in good agreement with theoretical ones.