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Characterizing mouse muscle material properties from biaxial loading
Oesch, Ethan Bishop
Oesch, Ethan Bishop
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2025
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Abstract
The structure-function relationship of skeletal muscle tissue is as complex as it is intriguing. Due to its transverse isotropy, skeletal muscle tissue presents a unique challenge in investigations aimed at characterizing its material properties. The material properties of muscle tissue are one type of informative data that are especially desirable for computational modeling studies. To date, there is a plethora of work that investigates the mechanical response of muscle tissue in single axis loading. Such studies aim to capture the mechanical and material properties of skeletal muscle through capturing the force-length relationship of muscle experimentally and use that information to quantify properties like stiffness. However, relatively few studies have been done to date that investigate how more complex loading conditions interact with muscle tissues’ transverse isotropy. Animal models are a common experimental model to use in investigations regarding skeletal muscle plasticity, but measurements of mouse muscle tissue properties specifically are limited. Further, computational modeling investigations into muscle mechanics are dependent on the quality and availability of data produced from experimentation. Thus, the purpose of this study was to determine the mechanical response of mouse muscle tissue when it is subjected to biaxial loading conditions and assess one constitutive formula’s accuracy in representing these responses. Stress-strain data was computed from muscle samples of eight C57BL/6 mice when subjected to 5 different loading conditions simulating uniaxial and biaxial loading. The results indicate that the Young's Modulus of murine muscle tissue is greater when loading muscle primarily in the direction perpendicular to the fiber direction than parallel with it. Regardless of direction, the Young’s Modulus was found to be significantly greater during biaxial loading than uniaxial loading. The computational model created in this study was fit to the experimental data and over or under predicts the experimental stress-strain for each loading condition not specifically fit to, indicating the differences in mechanical response to the different loading cases investigated are not something the model is able to capture.
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