THE MODELING OF FINITE STRAIN VISCOELASTIC MATERIALS MITALSKI_20221215.pdf

Models of human musculoskeletal tissue are the missing component needed to make significant advances in clinical orthopedics. Developing these models requires an in-depth knowledge of techniques and procedures which are rarely considered or taught in universities.  Essential skills like deriving the foundational physics and the constitutive theory from first principles are the building blocks which will deliver future models or ligaments, tendons, and muscles. This thesis presents the first step in a journey to understand these modeling techniques in order to move toward developing a model of human tissue. The material utilized in the experiments

was recipe of Ecoflex 00-20 which represents an idealized example of a large deformation viscoelastic solid. The Finite Strain Viscoelastic constitutive law was derived from first principles, uni-axial tension experiments provided the raw data, and the constitutive laws were fit to the data. The derived model outperformed most of the models with some exceptions described in the results. These results justify the development of more complicated models and experiments such as modeling surface field data and considering more complicated material properties.