Mechanical modeling of skin

\u3cp\u3eThe chapter describes the work that was performed in the soft tissue biomechanics laboratory at Eindhoven University of Technology on the biomechanics of skin. A rationale is given for the changes from standard testing methods to inverse methods, from in vitro to in vivo and back to in vitro testing and for the more detailed studies on individual skin layers of the last decade. The chapter tries to explain how our vision on testing methods and modeling changed over the years and why the pursuit towards a complete constitutive model is still ongoing.\u3c/p\u3

A hybrid method to determine material parameters of composites

This paper presents a method to determine parameters in constitutive equations, used for the description of the mechanical behaviour of composites. The method is based on: numerical analysis, strain distribution measurements and systems identification techniques. The method is especially suitable to study the behaviour of inhomogeneous materials. By means of a simulation it will be shown that for a solid with a varying fibre direction it is possible to estimate the stiffness parameters as well as the local fibre directions from one single test