An Invariant-Based Damage Model for Human and Animal Skins

Constitutive modelling of skins that account for damage effects is important to provide insight for various clinical applications, such as skin trauma and injury, artificial skin design, skin aging, disease diagnosis, surgery, as well as comparative studies of skin biomechanics between species. In this study, a new damage model for human and animal skins is proposed for the first time. The model is nonlinear, anisotropic, invariant-based, and is based on the Gasser–Ogden–Holzapfel constitutive law initially developed for arteries. Taking account of the mean collagen fibre orientation and its dispersion, the new model can describe a wide range of skins with damage. The model is first tested on the uniaxial test data of human skin and then applied to nine groups of uniaxial test data for the human, swine, rabbit, bovine and rhino skins. The material parameters can be inversely estimated based on uniaxial tests using the optimization method in MATLAB with a root mean square error ranged between 2.15% and 12.18%. A sensitivity study confirms that the fibre orientation dispersion and the mean fibre angle are among the most important factors that influence the behaviour of the damage model. In addition, these two parameters can only be reliably estimated if some histological information is provided. We also found that depending on the location of skins, the tissue damage may be brittle controlled by the fibre breaking limit (i.e., when the fibre stretch is greater than 1.13–1.32, depending on the species), or ductile (due to both the fibre and the matrix damages). The brittle damages seem to occur mostly in the back, and the ductile damages are seen from samples taken from the belly. The proposed constitutive model may be applied to various clinical applications that require knowledge of the mechanical response of human and animal skins.