Regensburg 2004 – scientific programme

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AKB: Biologische Physik

AKB 50: Poster Session "Biological Physics"

AKB 50.70: Poster

Friday, March 12, 2004, 10:30–13:00, B

Strain hardening of biological tissue — •Klaus Kroy and Thomas Franosch — Hahn-Meitner Institut, Berlin

It is an everyday experience that our tissue can easily be stretched to a certain (substantial) extent before dramatic strain hardening painfully prevents any further elongation. Our toy model for the non–linear elasticity of stiff polymer networks rationalizes this general phenomenology in terms of non–affine local deformations of the individual polymers that are attributed to their highly anisotropic elastic response. We analyze a particularly simple schematic ansatz for this non–affinity guided by an analogy to dilatancy in granular media, which leads to analytic results for the non–linear modulus and the yield strain as a function of the concentration and stiffness of the polymers.