Experimental and Constitutive Approaches for a Study of Mechanical Properties of Animal Tendons

Abstract

The aim of the work was an analysis of the seven hyperelastic material models ability to capture tendon (from a sheep and domestic pig) response during quasi-static tensile loading. In the first step, animal tendons were tested under tensile loading; then the neo-Hookean, Mooney-Rivlin, Ogden, Humprey, Martins, Veronda-Wenstmann and Yeoh material models were fitted to tendons tensile data. Three different approaches to a modeling procedure were used: (1) models were fitted to tensile data for all tested specimens and coefficients of models were averaged, (2) on the base on registered tensile curves, one average stress-stretch curve was determined and then models were fitted, and (3) for two above described variants, the tensile data were limited to the first and second phase of elongation during fitting procedure and extrapolated to the third phase. Models sensitivity to limitation of experimental data and possibility of predicting tensile behavior in full range of elongation were analyzed. The range of experimental data used to fit the model was crucial factor for the predictive ability of each model.