Class: BE210
Group: 101_A2
Members:

Antoinette Bailey
Patrick Crutchley
Chun Lai
Mona Shalwala
William Young

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This experiment will be performed in order to test the structural properties of skin surrogates.  It will use two types of suture stitches under one-dimensional (uniaxial) tension with the desktop Instron.  There are two basic types of suture techniques, the interrupted and running locked stitches.  The interrupted stitch is a suture technique where each stitch is a separate piece of vicryl suture and each is knotted separately with a surgeon’s knot.  The running locked stitch is a single, continuous piece of suture thread that goes through the entire length of the wound.  The purpose of this experiment is to determine which type of stitch is more suitable for cyclic loading vs. high stress loading.  The running locked stitch is predicted to be better suited for the cyclic loading because the flexible nature of the single thread will allow the stress field to shift and adjust to the cycles over time.  The interrupted stitch will be better suited for higher skin tensile loads because the entire system should not fail if one stitch breaks.  The single stitches are less flexible, but since they are tied individually, the system is more resilient.