Abstract
Cerebrospinal fluid hypovolemia onsets by the cerebrospinal fluid leak which might be induced by the impact loading at traffic accidents, sports and so on. However, the detail mechanism has not been clarified. We guess that the leaking starts at a dura mater around spinal nerve root and investigated the impact strength of the nerve root part. Spontaneously, it could be important to investigate the basic tensile properties, especially strain rate dependency of them, of dura mater to clear the leaking mechanism. In the present study, to investigate the mechanical properties of dura mater, tensile tests were performed using bovine dura mater of the cervical spine. The test pieces were taken from the dura mater along the spinal axial direction, then the tensile tests were carried out at strain rate ε^.e= 0.01, 0.1, 1.0, 10, and 100 s^<-1>. Stiffness of dura mater was calculated by applying the stress-strain responses to Ogden model. Tensile strength tended to increase with increase in strain rate. Especially, this tendency was remarkable at higher strain rate level. On the other hand, the stiffness tended to be smaller with increase in strain rate.
