Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Mechanical Behavior and Properties
of Adipose Tissue
Cees Oomens and Gerrit Peters
Abstract This chapter gives an overview of work on porcine adipose tissue that
was performed at Eindhoven University of Technology. It demonstrates that only
at very small strains, far away from the physiological strains we experience in
daily live, the behavior is more or less linear and can be described with standard
constitutive models. Long term oscillatory behavior and the behavior at large
strains is more complex and currently a highly unexplored area. Adipose tissue is
able to change its micro-structure such that at high strains or long times of har-
monic excitation the material behavior changes drastically. This structural change
is reversible after long periods of rest. The chapter is largely based on two papers
by Geerligs et al. [
3
,
4
].
1 Introduction
In this topic a chapter on mechanical properties of adipose or fat tissue cannot be
lacking, but unfortunately the literature on this subject is scarce. Although several
papers have been published in the past, claiming to produce data on the consti-
tutive behavior of adipose tissue, most of these are incomplete, only focusing at
some aspects of the material, e.g. creep or relaxation behavior [
8
,
11
], only to
compare properties of tissues [
15
] or very much focused on one type of tissue. The
majority of papers is focused on breast tissue and aimed at early detection of
cancer [
6
,
10
,
16
-
18
,
20
]. Comley and Fleck [
1
] performed unconfined com-
pression tests at a large range of strain rates. They went to strains up to 25 % and
fitted the model data with a single mode Ogden model. They found a more or less
elastic behavior in compression. Gefen and Haberman [
5
] used ovine adipose
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