Mechanical behavior of tissue simulants and soft tissues under extreme loading conditions

Abstract

Recent developments in computer-integrated surgery and in tissue-engineered constructs necessitate advances in experimental and analytical techniques in characterizing properties of mechanically compliant materials such as gels and soft tissues, particularly for small sample volumes. One goal of such developments is to quantitatively predict and mimic tissue deformation due to high rate impact events typical of industrial accidents and ballistic insults. This aim requires advances in mechanical characterization to establish tools and design principles for tissue simulant materials that can recapitulate the mechanical responses of hydrated soft tissues under dynamic contact-loading conditions. Given this motivation, this thesis studies the mechanical properties of compliant synthetic materials developed for tissue scaffold applications and of soft tissues, via modifying an established contact based technique for accurate, small scale characterization under fully hydrated conditions, and addresses some of the challenges in the implementation of this method. Two different engineered material systems composed of physically associating block copolymer gels, and chemically crosslinked networks including a solvent are presented as potential tissue simulants for ballistic applications, and compared directly to soft tissues from murine heart and liver. In addition to conventional quasistatic and dynamic bulk mechanical techniques that study macroscale elastic and viscoelastic properties, new methodologies are developed to study the small scale mechanical response of the aforementioned material systems to concentrated impact loading. The resistance to penetration and the energy dissipative constants are quantified in order to compare the deformation of soft tissues and mechanically optimized simulants, and to identify the underlying mechanisms by which the mechanical response of these tissue simulant candidates are modulated. Finally, given that soft tissues are biphasic in nature, atomic force microscopy enabled load relaxation experiments are utilized to develop approaches to distinguish between poroelastic and viscoelastic regimes, and to study how the anisotropy of the tissue structure affects elastic and transport properties, in order to inform the future design of tissue simulant gels that would mimic soft tissue response.