Bulge test method for measuring the hyperelastic parameters of soft membranes

Soft membranous materials widely exist in engineering and nature, and the determination of their constitutive parameters is of both scientific and engineering significance. In this paper, the bulge test method is extended to determine the hyperelastic parameters of soft membranes with or without initial stresses. Two extensively applied models—neo-Hookean model and Arruda–Boyce model—are employed to characterize the nonlinear behavior of the membrane under test. The hyperelastic parameters are then extracted from the pressure–deflection curve of the membrane recorded in the bulge tests. Our method is finally validated by both finite element simulations and uniaxial tension experiments. The proposed method can be used to evaluate various soft membranes and tissues and hold promise for numerous applications in such fields as biomedical engineering and bionic engineering.