Characterization and modeling of the anisotropic behavior of the porcine dermis

Abstract

This work uses a combined experimental and modeling investigation into the anisotropic behavior of porcine dermis. Porcine skin tissues have been used in various medical, cosmetic, and biomedical research applications. However, their tensile behavior still needs to be fully characterized. Much of the existing work uses the uniaxial experimental data from two orthogonally oriented specimens to inform and model the anisotropic behavior of the tissue. However, the skin has a complex fibrous architecture with several non-symmetric fiber families. Accordingly, we have (i) mechanically characterized the behavior of the porcine dermis using the experimental data from three differently orientated uniaxial tensile specimens (two orthogonal and one diagonal) and (ii) developed an enhanced constitutive model to better capture the observed behavior from three different orientations. The enhanced model takes into account the non-symmetric planar fiber distribution, the non-linearity of the ground substance, as well as the varying fiber responses along three orientations. We demonstrate significant improvement of the enhanced model over the prior literature to capture the observed nonlinear and anisotropic behavior from three differently oriented specimens simultaneously.