ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights similarities in the structure, mechanical characteristics and constitutive modeling of soft biological tissues and rubberlike materials for which many advances in the past have gone hand in hand. Several scientists have drawn attention to similarities between soft biological tissues and rubberlike materials. Soft biological tissues and rubber may be characterized as highly nonlinear materials undergoing finite strains. Extensions to include anisotropy are indicated in Horgan & Saccomandi, where also similarities between the rubber model and an isotropic version of a constitutive model for arterial wall mechanics, as proposed by Takamizawa & Hayashi, are documented. There are of course several examples in tissue mechanics in which heterogeneity has to be accounted for, as in the structure of arterial walls, which are composed of three distinct layers. Soft biological tissues and rubberlike materials are composite structures that derive their nonlinear properties from the specific distributions of the internal constituents.
