ABSTRACT
Many materials of technological interest exhibit anisotropic elastic behavior due to the presence of preferred directions in their microstructure. Examples of such materials include common engineering materials such as fiber-reinforced composites, reinforced rubber, wood, etc. as well as soft biological tissues such as arterial walls, heart tissues, etc. When these materials are subjected to small strains (less than 2-5%), their mechanical behavior can generally be modeled using conventional anisotropic linear elasticity. Under large deformations, however, these materials exhibit highly anisotropic and nonlinear elastic behavior due to rearrangements in the microstructure, such as reorientation of the fiber directions with deformation. The accurate simulation of these nonlinear large-strain effects requires the use of constitutive models formulated within the framework of anisotropic hyperelasticity.
