Abstract

Tendons are unique biological structures that allow for ultrafast, powerful movements, especially on smaller scales, where they can exert more power than muscle alone. Although they are essential to the function of a variety of species, there is significant work to be done in characterizing and modeling tendons to better understand how their structure leads to their specific material properties. While tendons are made up of complex, hierarchical components, this thesis aims to determine if their behavior on biological timescales can be approximated via linear viscoelastic theory. This thesis puts forward a method for obtaining material properties, specifically resilience, by using dynamic mechanical analysis and time-ethanol superposition to characterize tendon response to the high frequency changes in length it might experience in vivo. This data is the fit to a linear model and compared to direct measurements of tendon resilience in the literature. While the linear viscoelastic description of the model tends to significantly underestimate the actual resilience of tendon, it is possible that data analysis techniques, rather than complications from hierarchical structure, led to discrepancies. Therefore, this thesis sets the foundation for future experimental work with tendon.