A Composite Micromechanical Model for Connective Tissues: Part II—Application to Rat Tail Tendon and Joint Capsule

Abstract

A micromechanical model of fibrous soft tissue has been developed which predicts upper and lower bounds on mechanical properties based on the structure and properties of tissue components by Ault and Hoffman [3, 4]. In this paper, two types of biological tissue are modeled and the results compared to experimental test data. The highly organized structure of rat tail tendon is modeled using the upper bound aggregation rule which predicts uniform strain behavior in the composite material. This model fits the experimental data and results in a correlation coefficient of 0.98. Applied to cat knee joint capsule, the lower bound aggregation rule of the model correlates with the data and predicts uniform stress within this more loosely organized tissue structure. These studies show that the nature of the interactions between the components in tissue differs depending upon its structure and that the biomechanical model is capable of analyzing such differences in structure.