title: A tensile machine with a novel optical load cell for soft biological tissues application.
abstract: The uniaxial tensile testing machine is the most common device used to measure the mechanical properties of industrial and biological materials. The need for a low-cost uniaxial tension testing device for small research centers has always been the subject of research. To address this need, a novel uniaxial tensile testing machine was designed and fabricated to measure the mechanical properties of soft biological tissues. The device is equipped with a new low-cost load cell which works based on the linear displacement/force relationship of beams. The deflection of the beam load cell is measured optically by a digital microscope with an accuracy of 1 µm. The stiffness of the designed load cell was experimentally and theoretically determined at 100 N mm(-1). The stiffness of the load cell can be easily adjusted according to the tissue's strength. The force-time behaviour of soft tissue specimens was obtained by an in-house image processing program. To demonstrate the efficiency of the fabricated device, the mechanical properties of amnion tissue was measured and compared with available data. The obtained results indicate a strong agreement with that of previous studies.
authors.affiliation: Biomedical Engineering Department, Amirkabir University of Technology , Tehran , Iran.
authors.forename: Rahim
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Faturechi
authors.forename: Ata
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Hashemi
authors.forename: Nabiollah
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Abolfathi
mesh_terms: D004867:Equipment Design; D005321:Extraembryonic Membranes / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D008422:Materials Testing / Q000295:instrumentation*; D008853:Microscopy; D012984:Software; D013314:Stress, Mechanical; D013718:Tensile Strength
keywords: Beam theory; image processing; load cell; soft tissue testing; uniaxial tension test