A Nanoindentation Identification of Time-Dependent Relaxation and Creep Moduli for Periodontal Ligaments

Abstract

Nanoindentation has recently appeared as a powerful tool for measuring nano-scale mechanical properties of biological tissues. The majority of soft biological tissues such as ligaments and tendons exhibit as viscoelastic bodies or have time-dependent behaviour. In this paper, generalized Voigt-Kelvin and Wiechert models have been used to model the relaxation and creep behaviours of periodontal ligaments, in which relaxation and creep functions are represented by sum of a series of decaying exponential functions of time. The relaxation and creep moduli have been measured separately from two experimental tests.