Basic Funding
Characterisation of the skeletal muscle's passive properties is a challenging task since its structure is dominated by a highly complex and hierarchical arrangement of fibrous components at different scales.
The present project focuses on the micromechanical characterisation of skeletal muscle fibres, which consist of myofibrils, by realising three different deformation states, namely axial tension, axial compression, and transversal compression. To the best of the authors' knowledge, the present project provides a novel comprehensive data set representing different deformation states.
These data allow for a better understanding of muscle fibre load transfer mechanisms and can be used for meaningful modelling approaches. As the present study shows, axial tension and compression experiments reveal a strong tension-compression asymmetry at fibre level.
In comparison to the tissue level, this asymmetric behaviour is more pronounced at the fibre scale, elucidating the load transfer mechanism in muscle tissue and aiding in the development of future modelling strategies.
Further, a Bayesian hierarchical modelling approach was used to consider the experimental fluctuations in a parameter identification scheme, leading to more comprehensive parameter distributions that reflect the entire observed experimental uncertainty.