Expansion potential of auxetic prosthetic skin grafts: a review

Abstract

The expansion of conventional prosthetic skin grafts has been quantified to be very low and insufficient for treating large and severe burn injuries with small amounts of available donor skin. Auxetic metamaterials and structures are the new class of materials which shows expansion in both directions while stretching in one direction (i.e., negative Poisson’s effect). This property of auxetic materials offers unprecedented potential for expansions in prosthetic skin grafts, which is crucial for covering large burn injury sites. This review article focuses on summarizing the up-to-date literature on design and analysis of auxetic skin grafts, and their expansion potential. This knowledge is anticipated to advance burn mitigation research and allow for development of prosthetic skin grafts for severe burn skin replacements.

On the effect of the poisson’s ratio on samples subjected to shearing

“…The corpus of knowledge on auxetics has expanded significantly in the last decades [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22], particularly since the manufacture of the first soft auxetic material-a foam-which could be easily stretched and compressed by hand [23]. These novel materials were attributed several enhanced characteristics which are not normally manifested by their conventional counter-parts [24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31], which made them particularly appealing to the sports community [32][33][34][35][36][37][38].…”

Auxetic incisions with alternating slit shapes: a promising technique for enhancing synthetic skin grafts expansion

“…It is commonly used to treat burns, wounds, and other injuries that have damaged the skin. While skin grafting has been successful in many cases, this procedure faces some global issues (i.e., limited donor skin, cost, lack of suitable donors, donor site morbidity) [22,23].…”

“…The main drawback of meek grafting was availability of donor skin, risk of infection, and required spacilized training to cover the burn sites. Current skin grafting trends focus on improving the availability, effectiveness, expansions, and safety of the procedure [23]. Auxetic patterns were recently used in skin grafting to increase the expansion ratio and recover large burn areas effectively [34][35][36][37].…”

“…Recent reports indicate that auxetic materials produce extremely negative Poisson's ratios (NPR) and strong polymer expansion [43][44][45]. Also, it can be used for the development of high expansion skin grafts [23]. Particularly, alternating slit (AS) shaped auxetic structures have demonstrated a high capacity for generating areal enlargements [46].…”

“…In literature, several studies were performed to understand the effect of structural parameters such as unit cell length, spacing and orientation in Poisson's ratio [22,[47][48][49]. Based upon the previous studies, on increasing the axial length of the slits, the effective Poisson's ratio decreased [23,50,51]. In previous studies, Singh et al [35] performed the experiments on polymer based rotating triangle auxetic patterns with varying angles from 0°to 135°and tested uniaxially.…”