Chapter 3 - Viscohyperelastic Strain Energy Function

Abstract

In this chapter, we present a framework allowing to catch the viscoelastic behavior of soft tissues under large deformation. As illustration, we propose to follow the necessary steps to develop a novel dissipation potential that details the short-time component of viscoelastic response within the constitutive framework set forth by Pioletti and Rakotomanana (2000, Eur. J. Mech. A Solids, 19 (5), 749–759) for both short- and long-term memory effects in finite deformations. The proposed dissipation potential is capable of predicting various nonlinear viscoelastic behavior with just four descriptive material parameters whose introduction of which greatly simplifies the task in contrasting different strain-rate sensitive materials. Its theoretical development, material properties identification and numerical implementation are presented. This procedure is applied to uniaxial data of a biologic soft tissue, namely, the annulus fibrosus of a porcine intervertebral disc.