Identifying the parameters of viscoelastic model for a gel-type material as representative of cardiac muscle in dynamic tests

In this paper, mechanical parameters of a calf heart muscle are identified and a gel-type material as the representative of the cardiac muscle in dynamic tests is introduced. The motivation of this study is to introduce a replacement material of the heart muscle to use in experimental studies of the leadless pacemaker. A particular test setup is developed to capture the experimental data based on the stress relaxation test method where its outputs are time histories of the force and displacement. The standard linear solid model is used for mathematical modeling of the heart muscle sample and a gel-type material specimen namely alpha-gel. Five tests with different strain history (13.6%, 17.1%, 20.6%22.4% and, 23.8%) are performed by regarding and disregarding the influence of the initial ramp of the loading. The mechanical parameters of the standard linear solid model were identified with precise curve fitting. Consideration of the initial ramp significantly influences the consequences and they are so close to their experimental counterparts. The identified parameters of the standard linear solid model by regarding the influence of the initial ramp for the gel-type material are within an acceptable range for the viscoelastic properties of the calf heart tissue. These results show that the gel-type material has the potential to represent the cardiac muscle in the leadless pacemaker experimental studies. Dynamic mechanical analysis is used to characterize the dynamic viscoelastic properties for the gel by utilizing the identified parameters with taking into account the initial ramp in the frequency domain. Results show that Storage modulus, Loss modulus, and Loss tangent are strongly frequency-dependent especially at low-frequency around the heartbeat frequency range (0-2 Hz).