Abstract
A human tongue can be deformed largely owing to the incompressibility of muscle fascicles. A tongue, which consists of muscle fascicles, is called Muscular Hydrostat. The muscle activations cause large deformations of a tongue such as protrusion and licking. Physics-based simulations of tongue deformations using mathematical models are useful to find out the mechanisms of oral cavity functions. The purpose of this study is to simulate large deformations of a tongue by using the muscle fascicle model. The authors propose a muscle fascicle model which generates contraction force and deforms with preserving its volume. The muscle fascicle interacts with other fascicles to restrain overlap of their volume. A tongue muscle model is constructed by arranging several muscle fascicle models in various directions. In the simulation experiment, contraction forces were applied to each muscle fascicle model and simulated contractions of the muscle model. As the results of simulations, the muscle model contracted in response to the value of input with preserving its volume and deformations of tongue muscles could be represented by interaction between each muscle fascicles.
