The adhesion behavior is usually happened in the cornea related to the clinical treatments. Physiologically, an intact natural cornea is inflated by the intraocular pressure. Due to the inflation, the physiological cornea appears the mechanical property likeness to membrane. This characteristic is ignored by the classical theory used to analyze the adhesion behavior of soft solids, such as the Johnson-Kendall-Roberts (JKR) model. Performing the pull-off test, this work evidenced that the classical JKR solution was suitable to calculate the corneal adhesion force when the related contact area was in a smaller size of submillimeter scale. However, when the cornea was contacted in a greater size of millimeter scale, the JKR solutions were clearly smaller than the related experimental data. This error was complemented through modifying the classical JKR model. The modified-JKR model, in this study, was superimposed by the contribution from the surface tension related to the characteristic of membrane. Through the modified-JKR model, the scale effect of the corneal adhesion was realized to describe using a unified theory.
Adhesion behavior usually occurs in corneas associated with clinical treatments. Physiologically, an intact natural cornea is inflated by intraocular pressure. Due to the inflation, the physiological cornea has a mechanical property likeness to membrane. This characteristic is ignored by the classical theory used to analyze the adhesion behavior of soft solids, such as the Johnson–Kendall–Roberts (JKR) model. Performing the pull-off test, this work evidenced that the classical JKR solution was suitable for computing the corneal adhesion force corresponding to the submillimeter scale of contact. However, when the cornea was contacted at a millimeter scale, the JKR solutions were clearly smaller than the related experimental data. The reason was correlated with the membranous characteristic of the natural cornea was not considered in the JKR solid model. In this work, the modified JKR model was superimposed by the contribution from the surface tension related to the corneal inflation due to the intraocular pressure. It should be treated as a solid when the cornea is contacted at a submillimeter scale, whereas for the contact at a larger size, the characteristic of the membrane should be considered in analyzing the corneal adhesion. The modified JKR model successfully described the adhesion characteristics of the cornea from solid to membrane.
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