Abstract
The underlying fiber architecture of soft tissues, like bat wing skin, plays an important role in the material’s overall mechanical behavior. The mesoscopic birefringent fiber architecture of the bat wing skin can be visualized directly under polarized light. This inherent property is the key to the new experimental technique developed in this work: polarized image correlation (PIC). PIC is a technique for determining full field material strains and fiber kinematics of mesoscopically resolved fibrous tissues during biaxial mechanical testing. Not only is the material birefringence used to determine fiber kinematics under finite deformations, but it is also used for image correlation and strain field computation. Pure translation tests performed with PIC verify the accuracy of the technique. A segmental image processing method was developed to solve an experimental issue of changing birefringent properties to construct accurate continuous deformation profiles. By integrating PIC with traditional digital image correlation, both surface and subsurface data give additional insight into through thickness tissue behavior. The PIC technique is applicable to semi-transparent tissues with birefringent mesosopic structures; incorporation of microscopy would resolve smaller fiber structures. Future work includes extending the techniques to three dimensions to analyze curved surfaces.
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Notes
To fully characterize these materials, independent control of three separate strain components (or stress components) is required [38]. This would require independent control of, for example, the in-plane shear strains in addition to the two axial strains (see Holzapfel and Ogden [38] for a comprehensive discussion of the experimental requirements for constitutive modeling.). For thin biological membranes, biaxial testing may be sufficient since 2D membrane models are often applied.
Clamping is another attachment option; however, in addition to potentially damaging the sample, clamping induces stress concentrations at the corners between clamps, effectively ‘stress-shielding’ the central region [39]. This stress-shielding phenomenon makes the tissue appear stiffer because the applied force is not fully transferred to the central region. In contrast, suturing methods allow the tissue to freely expand in the lateral direction, minimizing boundary effects [39].
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Acknowledgments
We acknowledge support of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (Grant #F023809), the National Science Foundation (NSF IOS 1145549), and fellowship support from the Horace Rackham Graduate School of the University of Michigan.
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Skulborstad, A.J., Wang, Y., Davidson, J.D. et al. Polarized Image Correlation for Large Deformation Fiber Kinematics. Exp Mech 53, 1405–1413 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11340-013-9751-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11340-013-9751-4