Skeletal muscle as the propellant of animal motion presents a special challenge to the bio-mathematician because any successful mathematical model must be capable of predicting a wide variety of experimentally established phenomena. To overcome such difficulties, in this study, a new mechanical model of skeletal muscle is constructed using Marc, a commercial nonlinear structural analysis software. This new model is composed of an active contractile element (CE) which is in parallel with a passive hyperelastic element (PE). CE is assumed to deform as a large strain viscoelastic material and its constitutive behavior is expressed in terms of hereditary integrals. To express the decrease of muscle force which occurs by stretching the muscle to a length far longer than a critical value, a continuous damage model is applied to CE meanwhile. The material properties of CE and PE are given to the separate laminated layers of a composite model and the FEM simulation is performed under simple tension. The simulation results show that the new model can reproduce the mechanical response of skeletal muscle qualitatively very well.
Isamu RIKU (Wed,) studied this question.