Passive nonlinear elastic behaviour of skeletal muscle: experimental results and model formulation.

The goal of this study was to characterize the passive elastic behaviour of muscle and tendon tissues of rat tibialis anterior. For that purpose, tissue samples from 3 month old female Wistar rats (210+/-11g) were mechanically tested in vitro. Moreover, an in vivo device was developed to measure the muscle-tendon unit response to increasing load. Mechanical tests, consisting of uniaxial loading along the longitudinal axis of tendon and muscle strips, revealed the nonlinear mechanical behaviour of these tissues. A material model was formulated and its parameters fit to the experimental data using the Levenberg-Marquardt optimization algorithm. The fit goodness was assessed and R(2) values close to 1 and very low epsilon values were obtained. The passive behaviour of a future finite element model of a muscle-tendon unit will be validated against the in vivo passive extension tests by comparing the reaction force-extension curves.

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