Instabilities in elastomers and soft tissues

Abstract

Biological soft tissues exhibit elastic properties which can be dramatically different from rubber-type materials (elastomers). To gain a better understanding of the role of constitutive relationships in determining material responses under loads we compare three different types of instabilities (two in compression, one in extension) in hyperelasticity for various forms of strain energy functions typically used for elastomers and for soft tissues. Surprisingly, we find that the strain-hardening property of soft tissues does not always stabilize the material. In particular we show that the stability analyses for a compressed half-space and for a compressed spherical thick shell can lead to opposite conclusions: a soft tissue material is more stable than an elastomer in the former case and less stable in the latter case.

16 pages

References in corpus (1)

• Rayleigh waves and surface stability for Bell materials in compression; comparison with rubber

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Bending instabilities of soft tissues
• Gent models for the inflation of spherical balloons
• Asymptotic results for bifurcations in pure bending of rubber blocks
• Influence of non-hydrodynamic forces on the elastic response of an ultra-thin soft coating under fluid-mediated dynamic loading
• Likely equilibria of stochastic hyperelastic spherical shells and tubes
• Likely oscillatory motions of stochastic hyperelastic solids
• Compression Instabilities of Tissues with Localized Strain Softening
• Encasement as a morphogenetic mechanism: The case of bending