Preconditioning Balloons: Viscoelastic Biomedical Experiments
Students use balloons to explore and understand viscoelastic behavior.
Students use balloons (a polymer) to explore preconditioning—a viscoelastic material behavior that is important to understand when designing biomedical devices. They improve their understanding of preconditioning by measuring the force needed to stretch a balloon to the same displacement multiple times. Students gain experience in data collection and graph interpretation.
Bioengineers study biological materials and how they function in healthy and diseased states. Since biological materials possess viscoelastic behavior, engineers must understand this behavior in order to fully characterize these materials. Engineers may also design devices that come into contact with biological materials. So, to ensure effective and successful device performance, engineers must understand how the biological environment reacts to the forces that a device imposes. Polymers such as balloons also exhibit viscoelastic behavior and can be used to demonstrate and understand how biological materials function.
After this activity, students should be able to:
- Describe preconditioning using balloons. Specifically, students should be able to explain what is happening to polymers (on a molecular-level) during preconditioning.
- Graph collected data using Microsoft Excel.
- Calculate percent difference between two values.
- Identify points of equilibrium on a graph.
- Explain sources of error in experimental data.
- Communicate reasons or examples that understanding preconditioning of viscoelastic materials is important for engineering design.