Joe Barbenel (Strathclyde, UK)

The mechanical properties of soft body tissues

Abstract

The mechanical properties of the body tissues have become particularly relevant to two recent research areas. Teaching and training models of the body have become increasingly sophisticated and there is work on developing haptic models which are made of materials that mimic the body tissues and provide realistic tactile feed-back to the user, either local or distant. The second area is the stress analysis of body components using Finite Element (FE) methods. This has been driven by the appearance of FE packages containing nonlinear hyperelastic constitutive relations that have been used to model the nonlinear mechanical properties of the tissues.

The presentation will cover:

• An overview of the experimental mechanical properties of the soft tissues that should be incorporated into haptic models and which should form the basis of analytical descriptions.
• A discussion of how the experimental behaviour might be modelled as hyperelastic and the limitations of such representations. A simple technique for determining if the experimental results can be characterised as hyperelastic will be described.