TIME-DEPENDENT FRACTURE OF ARTICULAR CARTILAGE: PART 1 - THEORY & VALIDATION

A time-dependent large deformation fracture theory is developed for application to soft biological tissues. The theory uses the quasilinear viscoelastic theory of Fung, and particularizes it to constitutive assumptions on polyvinyl-chloride (PVC) (Part I) and cartilage (Part II). This constitutive theory is used in a general viscoelastic theory by Christensen and Naghdi and an energy balance to develop an expression for the fracture toughness of the materials. Experimental methods are developed for measuring the required constitutive parameters and fracture data for the materials. Elastic stress and reduced relaxation functions were determined using tensile and shear tests at high loading rates with rise times of 25-30 msec, and test times of 150 sec. The developed method was validated, using an engineering material, PVC to separate the error in the testing method from the inherent variation of the biological tissues. It was found that the the proposed constitutive modeling can predict the nonlinear stress-strain and the time-dependent behavior of the material. As an approximation method, a pseudo-elastic theory using the J-integral concept, assuming that the material is a time-independent large deformation elastic material, was also developed and compared with the time-dependent fracture theory. For PVC. the predicted fracture toughness is $1.2{\pm}0.41$ and $1.5{\pm}0.23\;kN/m$ for the time-dependent theory and the pseudo-elastic theory, respectively. The methods should be of value in quantifying fracture properties of soft biological tissues. In Part II, an application of the developed method to a biological soft tissue was made by using bovine humeral articular cartilage.