The mechanical properties of the porcine coronary arterial wall determined with a mixed experimental-numerical approach

The coronary arterial wall is anisotropic and has a highly non-linear stress-strain relationship[1-3]. A widely used method to measure this anisotropic non-linear behavior is to evaluate theresponse of the arterial wall when subjected to simultaneous inflation and axial extension [1-3]. Figure 1 shows a characteristic result obtained with such an ex vivo experiment (solid line)on a porcine LAD (C.N. van den Broek, unpublished data).The aim of this study is to investigate whether this characteristic behavior can be describedby a relatively simple, single layer, fiber reinforced neo-Hookean material model.