Abstract
Tensile testing of soft, slippery biological materials is a challenging task due to the difficulties associated with the gripping method and accurate measurement of axial and lateral strains. In this manuscript, the above issues were effectively resolved by using a shoulder-supported tensile specimen and digital image correlation (DIC) technique, respectively. The tensile response of agarose gel with concentration ranging from 1.5 to 4.0 wt% was determined using the above method. Unlike the previous literature where the tensile strain was obtained from machine crosshead displacement, the DIC technique utilized a speckle pattern introduced into the gage area to obtain full-field maps of axial and lateral strains. It is found that the tensile strength and modulus of agarose gel increases linearly with an increase in agarose concentration. The Poisson’s ratio was determined to be around 0.5 for virgin specimens and it decreased slightly with axial strain, possibly due to the loss of water during deformation.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Buckley CT, Thorpe SD, O’Brien FJ, Robinson AJ, Kelly DJ (2009) The effect of concentration, thermal history and cell seeding density on the initial mechanical properties of agarose hydrogels. J Mech Behav Biomed Mater 2(5):512–521
De Freitas SP, Wirz D, Stolz M, Göpfert B, Friederich N-F, Daniels AU (2006) Pulsatile dynamic stiffness of cartilage-like materials and use of agarose gels to validate mechanical methods and models. J Biomed Mater Res B Appl Biomater 78(2):347–357
Gu WY, Yao H, Huang CY, Cheung HS (2003) New insight into deformation-dependent hydraulic permeability of gels and cartilage, and dynamic behavior of agarose gels in confined compression. J Biomech 36(4):593–598
Amici E, Clark AH, Normand V, Johnson NB (2001) Interpenetrating network formation in agarose-sodium gellan gel composites. Carbohydr Polym 46(4):383–391
Walker EA, Verner A, Flannery CR, Archer CW (2000) Effect of compressive loading on chondrocyte differentiation in agarose cultures of chick limb-bud cells. J Orthop Res 18(1):78–86
Tripathy S, Berger E, Vemaganti K (2008) AFM indentation and material property identification of soft hydrogels. 2007 Proceedings of the ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, DETC2007, v 3 PART A, pp 659–667
Kwon JW, Subhash G (2010) Compressive strain rate sensitivity of ballistic gelatin. J Biomech 43:420–425
Olberding JE, Suh JKF (2006) A dual optimization method for the material parameter identification of a biphasic poroviscoelastic hydrogel: potential application to hypercompliant soft tissues. J Biomech 39(13):2468–2475
Park S, Costa KD, Ateshian GA, Hong K-S (2009) Mechanical properties of bovine articular cartilage under microscale indentation loading from atomic force microscopy. Proc IME H J Eng Med 223(3):339–347
Ebenstein DM, Pruitt LA (2004) Nanoindentation of soft hydrated materials for application to vascular tissues. J Biomed Mater Res A 69(2):222–232
Olberding, JE, Suh J-KF (2004) Validation studies for the dual optimization of indentation creep and stress relaxation of biological soft tissues using biphasic poroviscoelasticity: potential method for brain tissue. Advances in Bioengineering, BED, pp 383–384
Liu K-K, Ahearne M, Siamantouras E, Yang Y (2008) Micro-shaft-poking—A novel instrument for mechanically characterizing soft biomimetic membrance. Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Biomedical Electronics and Devices, v 2, pp 210–215
Rico F, Roca-Cusachs P, Gavara N, Farré R, Rotger M, Navajas D (2005) Probing mechanical properties of living cells by atomic force microscopy with blunted pyramidal cantilever tips. Physical Review E—Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics 72(2):1–10
Stellwagen NC (2002) The use of transient electric birefringence to characterize the conformation of DNA in solution, the mechanism of DNA gel electrophoresis, and the structure of agarose gels. Colloid Surface Physicochem Eng Aspect 209(2–3):107–122
Chen Q, Ringleb SI, Hulshizer T, An K-N (2005) Identification of the testing parameters in high frequency dynamic shear measurement on agarose gels. J Biomech 38(4):959–963
Chen Q, Suki B, An K-N (2004) Dynamic mechanical properties of agarose gels modeled by a fractional derivative model. J Biomech Eng 126(5):666–671
Urciuolo F, Imparato G, Netti PA (2008) Effect of dynamic loading on solute transport in soft gels implication for drug delivery. AIChE Journal 54(3):824–834
Neeves KB, Olbricht WL (2005) Multipole flows in poroelastic media and neural tissues. Conference Proceedings of 2005 AIChE Annual Meeting, p 1090
Johnson EM, Deen WM (1996) Hydraulic permeability of agarose gels. AIChE Journal 42(5):1220–1224
Normand V, Lootens DL, Amici E, Plucknett KP, Aymard P (2000) New insight into agarose gel mechanical properties. Biomacromolecules 1(4):730–738
Na YH, Tanaka Y, Kawauchi Y, Furukawa H, Sumiyoshi T, Gong JP, Osada Y (2006) Necking phenomenon of double-network gels. Macromolecules 39:4641–4645
Webber RE, Creton C, Brown HR, Gong J-P (2007) Large strain hysteresis and Mullins effect of tough double-network hydrogels. Macromolecules 40:2919–2927
Sutton MA, Wolters WJ, Peters WH, Ranson WF, McNeill SR (1983) Determination of displacements using an improved digital correlation method. Image Vis Comput 1(3):133–139
Lyons JS, Liu J, Sutton MA (1996) High-temperature deformation measurements using digital-image correlation. Exp Mech 36(1):64–70
Fang Q-Z, Wang TJ, Li H-M (2006) Large tensile deformation behavior of PC/ABS alloy. Polymer 47:5174–5181
Moy P, Tusit WT, Gunnarsson CL (2008) Tensile deformation of ballistic gelatin as a function of loading rate. Proceedings of the XIth International Congress and Exposition June 2–5, 2008 Orlando, Florida, USA, Society for Experimental Mechanics Inc.
Haile MA, Hernandez R, Ifju PG (2009) Viscoelastic constitutive model of collagen dermal implants. Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Mechanics, Albuquerque New Mexico, June 2009
Haile MA, Ifju PG (2009) Three dimensional nonlinear themoviscoelastic model of collagen dermal implants. Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on self healing materials, Chicago Illinois, July 2009
Liu Q, Subhash G, Moore D (2009) Concentration dependence of compressive behavior and stress- relaxation response in agarose gel. J Biomech Eng, Submitted
Yamamoto I, Ozawa S, Makino T, Yamaguchi M, Takamasu T (2008) Anisotropic elasticity of magnetically ordered agarose gel. Sci Tech Adv Mater 9:024214
Acknowledgement
This work was supported by a grant from Massachusetts Institute of Technology- Institute for Soldier Nanotechnology, US Army Research Office and JIEDDO. Qunli Liu sincerely acknowledges support from CDMRP and Henry M. Jackson Foundation Fellowship.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Subhash, G., Liu, Q., Moore, D.F. et al. Concentration Dependence of Tensile Behavior in Agarose Gel Using Digital Image Correlation. Exp Mech 51, 255–262 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11340-010-9354-2
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11340-010-9354-2