Mechanical Properties of Individual Porous Chitosan Particles: Full Scale and Numerical Experiments

The mechanical behavior of porous chitosan particles with various diameters obtained by freeze drying is investigated. The morphology of the particles is visualized by scanning electron microscopy. It is shown that the particles have a predominantly spherical shape and a honeycomb-like structure with interpenetrating pores. The mechanical characteristics of the particle material are modeled using the neo-Hookean, second-order Yeoh, Blatz-Ko, and third-order Ogden foam hyperelastic models, based on the results of mechanical compression tests between parallel plates and numerical solution of the reverse-engineering problem using the finite-element method. Force-displacement curves are plotted for the proposed models and then verified in a similar full-scale experiment with particles of another diameter.