Compressive behavior of porcine skin and its material modeling

ABSTRACT

We studied the mechanical behavior and material modeling of the porcine skin. Because porcine skin has similar histological and physiological features to human skin, it could serve a good human skin surrogate tissue. Global compressive responses were assessed using Mach-1 compression tests under three different quasi-static loading conditions with strain rates of 0.1/s, 0.025/s, and 0.0065/s. Experimental results revealed that strain dependency increased after 0.15 of compressive true strain. Using those experimental data, we determined material constants in material modeling to capture hyper-elastic mechanical behavior with assumptions of incompressibility and isotropy . Ogden constitutive model presented the best fit. For validation,

finite element (FE) analysis with a skin model was run using FEBio software with satisfactory results. This computational model can be used to develop an FE model of a human head to simulate impact.

skin; scalp; skin mechanics, constitutive modeling for skin; FEBio