Sheep Sclera Soft Tissue Subjected to Mechanical Equi-Biaxial Testing

A better understanding of diseases progress in tissues vest on the accurate understanding of tissues under mechanical loading. Also, development of therapies for injuries may depend on the available mechanical data for soft tissues. In this study, the raw data of biaxial tensile testing of sclera soft tissue is presented in this paper. Biaxial mechanical testing of soft tissues presents details understanding of how soft tissues behave when compared to uniaxial testing. Biomechanical properties of soft tissues are vital in the development of accurate computational models. Reliable computational models of studying mechanisms of diseases depends mainly on the accurate and more details mechanical behavior of soft tissues. These accurate and detailed computational models may be utilized to further develop the understanding and therapies of various diseases. The mechanical tensile testing was conducted on the passive sheep sclera. Engineering stress vs strain of several samples of the sheep sclera are further presented determined from force and displacement experimental data. The goal of this paper is to make available biaxial data of sheep sclera soft tissue that can be further utilized.

Mechanical Strength of Poly Nanofiber Patch Under a Biaxial Tensile Loading

Most conventional material testing apparatuses are unable to assess poly-nanofibers sheets in biaxial directions. This study reports the design and prototyping of a biaxial tensile apparatus which can measure the mechanical property of a poly nanofibers patch. Several samples were assessed using the designed biaxial tensile testing machine and results recorded. Function of the apparatus was validated versus convention methods and outcome confirmed that it is accurate and reliable for testing poly nanofibers patch.

Mechanical properties of UN-5100 envelope material for stratospheric airship

ABSTRACT Stratospheric airships are promising aircraft, usually designed as a non-rigid airship. As an essential part of the non-rigid airship, the envelope plays a significant role in maintaining its shape and bearing the external force load. Generally, the envelope material of a flexible airship consists of plain-weave fabric, composed of warp and weft fibre yarn. At present, biaxial tensile experiments are the primary method used to study the stress–strain characteristics of such flexible airship materials. In this work, biaxial tensile testing of UN-5100 material was carried out. The strain on the material under unusual stress and the stress ratio were obtained using Digital Image Correlation (DIC) technology. Also, the stress–strain curve was corrected by polynomial fitting. The slope of the stress–strain curve at different points, the Membrane Structures Association of Japan (MSAJ) standard and the Radial Basis Function (RBF) model were compared to identify the stress–strain characteristics of the materials. Some conclusions on the mechanical properties of the flexible airship material can be drawn and will play a significant role in the design of such envelopes.

Computational Optimization Study of Transcatheter Aortic Valve Leaflet Design Using Porcine and Bovine Leaflets

In this study, a Bayesian optimization (BO) based computational framework is developed to investigate the design of transcatheter aortic valve (TAV) leaflets and to optimize leaflet geometry such that its peak stress under the blood pressure of 120 mmHg is reduced. A generic TAV model is parametrized by mathematical equations describing its 2D shape and its 3D stent-leaflet assembly line. Material properties previously obtained for bovine pericardium (BP) and porcine pericardium (PP) via a combination of flexural and biaxial tensile testing were incorporated into the finite element (FE) model of TAV. A BO approach was employed to investigate about 1000 leaflet designs for each material under the nominal circular deployment and physiological loading conditions. The optimal parameter values of the TAV model were obtained, corresponding to leaflet shapes that can reduce the peak stress by 16.7% in BP and 18.0% in PP, compared with that from the initial generic TAV model. Furthermore, it was observed that while peak stresses tend to concentrate near the stent-leaflet attachment edge, optimized geometries benefit from more uniform stress distributions in the leaflet circumferential direction. Our analysis also showed that increasing leaflet contact area redistributes peak stresses to the belly region contributing to peak stress reduction. The results from this study may inspire new TAV designs that can have better durability.

Experimental Investigation of the Mechanisms and Performance of Active Auxetic and Shearing Textiles

Anisotropic textiles are commonly used in wearable applications to achieve varied bi-axial stress-strain behavior around the body. Auxetic textiles, specifically those that exhibit a negative Poisson’s ratio (v), likewise exhibit intriguing behavior such as volume increase in response to impact or variable air permeability. Active textiles are traditional textile structures that integrate smart materials, such as shape memory alloys, shape memory polymers, or carbon nanotubes, to enable spatial actuation behavior, such as contraction for on-body compression or corrugation for haptic feedback. This research is a first experimental investigation into active auxetic and shearing textile structures. These textile structures leverage the bending- and torsional-deformations of the fibers/filaments within traditional textile structures as well as the shape memory effect of shape memory alloys to achieve novel, spatial performance. Five textile structures were fabricated from shape memory alloy wire deformed into needle lace and weft knit textile structures. All active structures exhibited anisotropic behavior and four of the five structures exhibited auxetic behavior upon free recovery, contracting in both x- and y-axes upon actuation (v = −0.3 to −1.5). One structure exhibited novel shearing behavior, with a mean free angle recovery of 7°. Temperature-controlled biaxial tensile testing was conducted to experimentally investigate actuation behavior and anisotropy of the designed structures. The presented design and performance of these active auxetic, anisotropic, and shearing textiles inspire new capabilities for applications, such as smart wearables, soft robotics, reconfigurable aerospace structures, and medical devices.

Optimal Design of a Miniaturized Cruciform Specimen for Biaxial Testing of TA2 Alloys

The biaxial tensile testing of cruciform specimens is an effective way to create complex loading, and is a feasible experimental method for studying the subsequent yield behavior. However, relevant knowledge gaps still exist in the geometric design of miniaturized cruciform specimens which are applicable to test machines with maximum load less than 5000 N. The present work outlines the systematic investigations of the optimal design of the miniaturized cruciform specimen of a commercial pure titanium TA2 for biaxial tensile testing. Finite element modeling (FEM) coupled with the orthogonal design is employed to explore the influence of various geometric parameters, i.e., the thickness of the central gauge region, the width, the length, and the number of the slit, and the radius of the inner chamfer, on the stress distribution of the central gauge region. The optimal geometric design of the miniaturized cruciform specimen is successfully obtained, simultaneously considering the stress uniformity in the central gauge region and economic factors. The full-field strain distributions are also determined via the digital image correction (DIC) technique, which confirm the accuracy of the results achieved from FEM. This work provides a complete and reliable procedure for optimizing the geometry of miniaturized cruciform specimens, whose application can be expanded to other metals in the future.