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Biological soft tissues like muscles and cartilages are anisotropic, inhomogeneous, and nearly incompressible. The incompressible material behavior may lead to some difficulties in numerical simulation, such as volumetric locking and solution divergence. Mixed u-P formulations can be used to overcome incompressible material problems. The hyperelastic materials can be used to describe the biological skeletal muscle behavior. In this study, experiments are conducted to obtain the stress-strain behavior of a solid silicone rubber tube. It is used to emulate the skeletal muscle tensile behavior. The stress-strain behavior of silicone is compared with that of muscles. A commercial finite element analysis package ABAQUS is used to simulate the stress-strain behavior of silicone rubber. Results show that mixed u-P formulations with hyperelastic material model can be used to successfully simulate the muscle material behavior. Such an analysis can be used to simulate and analyze other soft tissues that show similar behavior.

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The present study investigates numerically the compressive residual strength of indented sandwich composite panel. The composite is made of carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) face sheets and aluminum honeycomb core. The sandwich is loaded under quasi-static condition and along out-of-plane direction. A commercial finite element analysis software ABAQUS is used. The results show that the indented composite retains significant amount of strength after indentation. And, the post-indentation strength of the composite is about 65% its pre-indentation strength under compression.

The objective of this study is to investigate the effect of the low or high strain rate on the impact fatigue properties of the nickel foam material and to understand the lifetime of this material which is subjected to the repeated impacts at different energy levels. Failures of foam materials under single and repeated impacts analogous to fatigue are essential to designers and users in military and aerospace structures. The material failure induced by repeated impact loading becomes a critical issue because of significant loss of stiffness and compressive strength in the foam material. Testing methods to study impact(that is, high strain rate) fatigue are quite numerous; no single standard testing procedure is defined for studying the impact fatigue property of a material. The increasing application of foam material in aerospace structures, owing to high specific stiffness and strength has attracted a great concern about the high sensitivity to impact damage introduced during manufacture or in service, and the effects of such damage on structural degradation. To investigate this issue, this study sets up an experimental procedure to determine the impact fatigue properties of nickel foam material. This study performs both experimental and numerical investigations to catch the impact fatigue behavior of nickel foam with open type. Design life and probability of failure or survival at specified life can be calculated so that the fatigue life of nickel core material subjected to repeated impact loading is predicted.