DIRECTIONAL BIOMECHANICAL PROPERTIES OF PORCINE SKIN TISSUE

Skin is a multilayered composite material and composed principally of the proteins collagen, elastic fibers and fibroblasts. The direction-dependent material properties of skin tissue is important for physiological functions like skin expansion. The current study has developed methods to characterize the directional biomechanical properties of porcine skin tissues as studies have shown that pigs represent a useful animal model due to similarities between porcine and human skin. It is observed that skin tissue has a nonlinear anisotropy biomechanical behavior, where the parameters of material modulus is 378 ± 160 kPa in the preferred-fiber direction and 65.96 ± 40.49 kPa in the cross-fiber direction when stretching above 30% strain equibiaxially. The result from the study provides methods of characterizing biaxial mechanical properties of skin tissue, as the collagen fiber direction appears to be one of the primary determinants of tissue anisotropy.