Foundations of Viscoelasticity and Application to Soft Tissue Mechanics

Soft tissues are complex media; they display a wide range of mechanical properties such as anisotropy and non-linear stress-strain behaviour. They undergo large deformations and they exhibit a time-dependent mechanical behaviour, i.e. they are viscoelastic. In this chapter we review the foundations of the linear viscoelastic theory and the theory of Quasi-Linear Viscoelasticity (QLV) in view of developing new methods to estimate the viscoelastic properties of soft tissues through model fitting. To this aim, we consider the simple torsion of a viscoelastic Mooney-Rivlin material in two different testing scenarios: step-strain and ramp tests. These tests are commonly performed to characterise the time-dependent properties of soft tissues and allow to investigate their stress relaxation behaviour. Moreover, commercial torsional rheometers measure both the torque and the normal force, giving access to two sets of data. We show that for a step test, the linear and the QLV models predict the same relaxation curves for the torque. However, when the strain history is in the form of a ramp function, the non-linear terms appearing in the QLV model affect the relaxation curve of the torque depending on the final strain level and on the rising time of the ramp. Furthermore, our results show that the relaxation curve of the normal force predicted by the QLV theory depends on the level of strain both for a step and a ramp tests. To quantify the effect of the non-linear terms, we evaluate the maximum and the equilibrium (as t → ∞) values of the relaxation curves. Our results provide useful guidelines to accurately fit QLV models in view of estimating the viscoelastic properties of soft tissues.