Dynamics of biological soft tissue and rubber: internally pressurized spherical membranes surrounded by a fluid

The behavior of a family of dynamical systems representing the elastodynamic response of an internally pressurized, non-linearly elastic spherical membrane lying in an incompressible external fluid is governed primarily by the strain energy function for the membrane, the specific forcing function due to the internal pressure, and the viscosity of the external fluid. It is shown that such systems with an inviscid external fluid and having a constant internal pressure are integrable but not Hamiltonian. Under periodic internal loading, and for a small spherical radius and constitutive relations typical of many biological soft tissues, a periodic orbit in phase space exists near a static equilibrium. A viscous external fluid causes the periodic orbit to be an attractor. The dynamical system is robust under small loading perturbations common in normal biological systems. Rubber models, on the other hand, may admit structural catastrophes. For small initial sphere radii, a jump from one periodic orbit to another is possible for rubber models but not for the classical soft tissue models. It is dangerous, therefore, to model soft biological tissue as a rubber either mathematically or physically in experiments because the predicted instabilities may not exist in tissue.