The Application of Finite Element Analysis on Polydimethylsiloxane

An artificial skin should have the similarities of the human skin in term of biomechanical properties. In this paper, Polydimethysiloxane (PDMS) have been chosen as artificial skin material. PDMS specimens were prepared and the hardness of the material will be altered by adding different percentages of diluents to the mixture of the base and a cross-linker component. It indicated that the physiological elastic modulus depends strongly on the definition of the stress-strain curve, mixing ratio and strain rate. Tensile and compression test are conducted to find out the Hyperelastic (HE) coefficient and Young's modulus. These material coefficients will be used to define the constitutive model of PDMS for finite element analysis study. In this paper, three dimensional (3D) finite element (FE) stress and displacement analysis were used. Three types of models with different values of height were simulated in COMSOL MULTIPHYSICS. The analysis of the von Mises stress and surface deflection values revealed that maximum stress and maximum deflection concentration were located in the region near line load. PDMS polymer 10:1 is the softer product and can be commercialized as artificial skin material.