Hyper-viscoelastic characterization of the urethra

Abstract Hyper-viscoelastic models have been used to characterize large strains coupled with viscosity. In this study, we aimed to model the urethral in-vivo biomechanics through a hyper-viscoelastic implementation. First, we used isotropic 2-parameter Demiray model for identification of urethral tube inflation after refining the values of quasistatic states. Attempting the approach by Holzapfel et. al., the average ratio of the elastic and dynamic modulus was computed to determine the stress contribution of the viscoelastic branches. The values of the parameters were determined after constraining a constant Energy dissipation (generalized maxwell) over range 1s to 100s. For the hyper-viscoelastic comparison implementation, it was observed that the goodness of fit criteria performs good for half of the samples (Adjusted R2>0.95). In some samples, the model is limited to fit ‘S’ shape curves but still performed well. The above identification technique and the hyper-viscoelastic in-silico approaches show that our approach fares sufficiently for the creep response characterization of the urethra.