Applicability of Mooney-Rivlin model for studying hyperelastic behavior of tongue

Abstract

The hypertrophy and relaxation of tongues easily leads to patients’ airway obstruction during sleep, which will cause obstructive sleep apnea hypopnea syndrome (OSAHS). Therefore, studying biomechanical properties of tongues with constitutive relation to obtain related parameters is important. In this paper, applicability study is performed to specify the tongues’ mechanical properties (TMP) based on the Mooney-Rivlin hyperelastic model. Firstly, the research on uniaxial stretching vitro experiments of pig tongues was carried out; then, the material parameters of the proposed model were determined with reference to the experiments results; finally, the advantages and disadvantages of the model to detail the TMP were discussed respectively. The results showed that the Mooney-Rivlin hyperelastic model has a simple structure, which reflects the TMP well while appearance of large deformation but fails to reflect the TMP while the strain is small in linear segment, but that of the toe segment is in contrast to the linear segment.