The
Relationship between Collagen Content and Tensile Strength of Skin Samples
Name: Bethany Baumann
Class: BE 210
The goal of this experiment is to quantify the amount of collagen in skin from various sources and compare it to a mechanical property of skin from the same source. While collagen does have an effect on Young’s modulus of stress strain curves, it is the primary component of skin responsible for the post-elastic deformation region of the curve. Therefore, the most appropriate mechanical property to compare collagen content to would be failure strength. The central hypothesis of this experiment is that higher collagen contents will be accompanied by higher failure strengths. To test this, a regression can be made of collagen content vs. failure strength. If the slope of the regression is significantly greater than zero, the hypothesis can be accepted.
There is experimental evidence that the relationship between collagen and skin strength is strong. A previous experiment reported a significant correlation coefficient of 0.973 between insoluble collagen content in rat skin and failure strength at low loading rates [3]. Since this value is so high (r values range from -1 to 1), it may be possible to produce significant results in the BE lab.