Mechanical Characterization of Soft Tissue Simulant Materials

Abstract

Safety assessment against penetrating injury such as skin laceration requires a soft tissue simulant that can mimic the mechanical behavior of human soft tissue. In this study, in order to investigate the mechanical characteristics of soft tissue simulant materials available in the market, several kinds of simulant material (silicones and urethanes) were characterized using uniaxial tensile, planar tensile and equibiaxial tensile tests. The mechanical behaviors of those simulant materials were also compared with the mechanical behavior of porcine skin reported in the literature. Furthermore, the simulant materials were modeled using hyperelastic Ogden model by identifying the values of model parameters according to the tensile test results.