• Robust analysis tool for elastic, viscoelastic, and failure mechanical properties • No difference in result between manual and semi-automatic analysis via MechAnalyser • Time reduction up to more than tenfold time compared to manual analysis • Allows efficient calculation of advanced mechanical properties • Extendable for experiments beyond compression, indentation, and stress-relaxation Mechanical testing is widely used to characterise biological and engineered materials. However, data analysis is time-consuming and a lack of standardisation introduces user-dependent variability and limits reproducibility and comparability across laboratories. To address this, we developed MechAnalyser , a standalone software application that provides automated analysis of mechanical testing data and includes visual and interactive quality control and extensibility for future experiment types. MechAnalyser currently quantifies Young’s modulus, failure properties, time constant of decay ( τ ), toughness, and energy dissipation. Accuracy and efficiency were evaluated in a comparison experiment where seven independent users analysed heterogeneous compression-to-failure, stress-relaxation, and micro-indentation datasets using both their own manual workflows and MechAnalyser . Users analysed Young’s modulus and τ while recording the dataset preparation and analysis times. Automated analysis reproduced manual results with high accuracy across a wide mechanical range (e.g., Young’s modulus adj. R 2 = 0.9998 for compression to failure and 0.974 for indentation; τ adj. R 2 from 0.797 to 0.991), while significantly reducing preparation (up to 3.5x) and analysis time (up to 15x) for all users and decreasing inter-user variability. The integrated transcoder further enabled consistent analysis of datasets acquired from different instruments and formats. These results demonstrate that MechAnalyser provides a robust, time-efficient, and reproducible approach to mechanical data analysis and thus contributes towards standardising mechanical analysis workflows for biomaterials.
Hinrichs et al. (Fri,) studied this question.