Artificial skin with varying biomechanical properties

Abstract

Simulants, which precisely mimic human skin's mechanical properties, are valuable for the study of the biomechanics of skin implants and prosthetics under static and dynamic loading conditions. To date, gelatin and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) have been used to develop human skin surrogates with simplified mechanical properties, such as an average elastic modulus and Poisson’s ratio. Pigskin and cowhides have also been employed to study human skin, despite their widely different mechanical properties. This work used a castable (to any size and form), low-cost, two-part silicone-based polymeric material to develop and fabricate artificial skin with varying shore hardness. Uniaxial tensile tests were conducted to record the force–displacement values, and the stress–strain curves were plotted to evaluate the mechanical behavior of the artificial skin simulants with different shore hardness. The mechanical behavior of the artificial skin can be tuned to mimic the human skin properties from different locations of the body with varying stiffnesses, with a high degree of accuracy. These artificial skin variants are anticipated to help surgeons to conduct presurgical planning for severe injuries, as well as surgical training in medical colleges. This can also be used to evaluate different suturing techniques, as well as to replace non-functional tissues and diagnose diseases. To date, human tissues, particularly skin, have been difficult to acquire and test in a laboratory environment due to ethical and biosafety concerns. In clinical surgical training, the artificial simulant would be crucial for substituting cadaveric human skin.