Connective tissue mechanics is highly nonlinear, exhibits a strong Poisson's effect, and is associated with significant collagen fiber re-arrangement. Although the general features of the stress-strain behavior have been discussed extensively, the Poisson's effect received less attention. In general, the relationship between the microscopic fiber network mechanics and the macroscopic experimental observations remains poorly defined. The objective of the present work is to provide additional insight into this relationship. To this end, results from models of random collagen networks are compared with experimental data on reconstructed collagen gels, mouse skin dermis, and the human amnion. Attention is devoted to the mechanism leading to the large Poisson's effect observed in experiments. The results indicate that the incremental Poisson's contraction is directly related to preferential collagen orientation. The experimentally observed downturn of the incremental Poisson's ratio at larger strains is associated with the confining effect of fibers transverse to the loading direction and contributing little to load bearing. The rate of collagen orientation increases at small strains, reaches a maximum, and decreases at larger strains. The peak in this curve is associated with the transition of the network deformation from bending dominated, at small strains, to axially dominated, at larger strains. The effect of fiber tortuosity on network mechanics is also discussed, and a comparison of biaxial and uniaxial loading responses is performed.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

The purpose of this work is to develop anisotropic strain gradient linear elastic continuum models for two-dimensional random fiber networks. The constitutive moduli of the strain gradient equivalent continuum are assessed based on the response of the explicit network representation in so-called windows of analysis, in which each fiber is modeled as a beam and the fibers are connected at crossing points with welded joints. The principle of strain energy equivalence based on the extension to the strain gradient of the Hill–Mandel macro homogeneity condition is employed to identify the classical and strain gradient moduli, based on the application of a sequential set of polynomial displacements on windows of analysis of different sizes. The scaling of the first- and second-order moduli with network parameters, such as network density and the ratio of fiber bending to axial stiffness, is determined. We observe a similar dependency of classical and strain gradient moduli on the same network parameters. The internal length scales associated with the gradient coefficients of the constitutive equation are also defined in terms of the network parameters. The strain gradient moduli prove to be size-independent in the affine regime, and they converge toward a size-independent value in the non-affine deformation regime after a rescaling of physical dimensions by the window size. The obtained results show that the strain gradient moduli scale uniformly with the square of the magnitude of the strain gradients applied to the window of analysis.