Study on the Effect of Sample Temperature on the Uniaxial Compressive Mechanical Properties of the Brain Tissue

Abstract

Craniocerebral injury has been a research focus in the field of injury biomechanics. Although experimental endeavors have made certain progress in characterizing the material behavior of the brain, the temperature dependency of brain mechanics appears to be inconclusive thus far. To partially address this knowledge gap, the current study measured the brain material behavior via unconstrained uniaxial compression tests under low strain rate (0.0083 s-1) and high strain rate (0.83 s-1) at four different sample temperatures (13°C, 20°C, 27°C, and 37°C). Each group has 9~12 samples. One-way analysis of variance method was used to study the influence of sample temperature on engineering stress. The results show that the effect of sample temperature on the mechanical properties of brain tissue is significant under the high strain rate, especially at low temperature (13°C), in which the hardening of the brain tissue is very obvious. At the low strain rate, no temperature dependency of brain mechanics is noted. Therefore, the current results highlight that the temperature of the brain sample should be ensured to be in accordance with the living subject when studying the biomechanical response of living tissue.