Work in progress · still being written
Elephant Skin Mechanics
Full-field strain measurement of elephant skin with digital image correlation, for insight into soft-tissue mechanics that informs biomimetic materials and robotics.
Eyy engineering strain field evolving through a loading cycle (Eulerian frame).
01Soft-tissue mechanics
Biological soft tissues solve problems engineered materials struggle with: large reversible deformation, direction-dependent stiffness and toughness, all at once. Elephant skin is an extreme, accessible case. Characterizing how it strains under load gives the Geometry of Materials Lab a reference point for designing programmable, biomimetic materials.
02Digital image correlation
DIC tracks a high-contrast speckle pattern across video frames to reconstruct full-field displacement and strain, with nothing touching the specimen. I prepared specimens, applied speckle patterns, ran tensile tests, and processed the imagery into strain fields.
- Compared graphite-coated and speckled specimens to optimize contrast and tracking.
- Computed Eyy strain fields (Eulerian and Lagrangian) and displacement maps in MATLAB.
- Ran cyclic loading to capture the tissue's hysteretic, history-dependent response.
03Results
The strain fields show strong spatial heterogeneity. Strain concentrates around wrinkles and structural features instead of spreading uniformly, and the response stiffens and shifts across loading cycles. This is the ground-truth data needed to validate soft-tissue constitutive models.