Prediction of the elastic strain limit of tendons

Abstract

The elastic strain limit of the tendon appears to be an omnipresent parameter in the literature in many of the problems described related to its pathologic conditions, which are often related to the repetitive loading tendons undergo during life. In other words, the study of the fatigue resistance of the tendons may provide information about the etiology of these pathologies. The elastic strain limit corresponds to the point after which micro-damage in the tendon starts. Thus, the prediction of this limit and its use in the design of fatigue loading protocols, may benefit the understanding of the onset and evolution of damage which is intimately related to the repair capacity of the cells. The variability of the elastic strain limit between different individuals makes it difficult to choose the applied load in these tests. This thesis shows a possible approach to predict the elastic strain limit based on a point-wise comparison of the sample’s stress- strain curve to a set of N number of failure curves from a database that was constructed for this purpose. The accuracy of the method proved to be statistically significantly (p