The University of Texas at Austin Center for · Electromechanics (UT-CEM) is a research center which specializes in pulse power technology. DoD's mission for high performance power sources has lead UT-CEM to incorporate advanced composite materials into compulsator designs. However, to achieve these high performance levels, improvements are needed in the thermal and structural properties for arm...

Articular cartilage is the soft tissue that covers contacting surfaces of bones in synovial joints. Cartilage is composed of chondrocytes and an extracellular matrix containing numerous biopolymers, cations and water. Healthy cartilage functions biomechanically to provide smooth and stable joint movement. Degenerative joint diseases such as osteoarthritis involve cartilage deterioration, result...

The material properties of passive skeletal muscle are critical to proper function and are frequently a target for therapeutic and interventional strategies. Investigations into the passive viscoelasticity of muscle have primarily focused on characterizing the elastic behavior, largely neglecting the viscous component. However, viscosity is a sizeable contributor to muscle stress and extensibil...

Bone exhibits rate-dependent failure behavior, suggesting that viscoelasticity is a factor in the damage and fracture of bone. Microdamage initiates at scales below the macroscopic porosity in bone, and, as such, is affected by the intrinsic viscoelasticity of the bone tissue. The viscoelasticity of the bone tissue can be measured by nanoindentation and recording the creep behavior at constant ...

Although the skin's mechanical properties are well characterized in tension, little work has been done in compression. Here, the viscoelastic properties of a population of mouse skin specimens (139 samples from 36 mice, aged 5 to 34 weeks) were characterized upon varying specimen thickness, as well as strain level and rate. Over the population, we observed the skin's viscoelasticity to be quite...

Reaching toward a point target has been intensively studied in human motor control. However, little is known about reaching toward a redundant target, such as grasping a bar, in which the grasping point is irrelevant to the achievement of a task. We examined whether humans could solve the target-redundancy and control problems in a serial fashion or control their body without solving the target...

Time-harmonic shear wave elastography is capable of measuring viscoelastic parameters in living tissue. However, finite tissue boundaries and waveguide effects give rise to wave interferences which are not accounted for by standard elasticity reconstruction methods. Furthermore, the viscoelasticity of tissue causes dispersion of the complex shear modulus, rendering the recovered moduli frequenc...

Magneto-active polymers (MAPs), composed of polymer matrices and magnetic filler particles, are smart materials that deform quickly in an external magnetic field. The ability to produce large deformation of MAPs makes these materials promising for actuators and sensors. Due to the viscoelasticity of the polymer matrices, MAPs usually demonstrate ratedependent dynamic properties. However, very f...

Viscoelasticity and variable mass are common phenomena in Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS), could be described by a fractional derivative damping stochastic process, respectively. To study the dynamic influence cased viscoelasticity mass, stationary response of kind nonlinear systems with variable-mass derivative, is investigated this paper. Firstly, an approximately equivalent system st...

INTRODUCTION Hyperelastic models for articular cartilage have been developed for decades [1, 2]. These models have some capacity in predicting the cartilage load response in compression, but can unlikely account for time dependent behavior of soft tissues in tension as the inherent viscoelasticity of the tissue has not been taken into account. This study aims at developing an anisotropic viscoh...