Papers Published

1. B. S. Myers and J. H. Mcelhaney and B. J. Doherty, The viscoelastic responses of the human cervical-spine in torsion - experimental limitations of quasi-linear theory, and a method for reducing these effects, Journal Of Biomechanics, vol. 24 no. 9 (1991), pp. 811 -- 817 .
   (last updated on 2008/07/23)

   Abstract:
   The dynamic torsional viscoelastic responses of the human cadaver cervical spine were measured in vitro. The quasi-linear formulation of time dependent behavior was used to describe and predict the resultant torque as a function of applied angular deflection and time. The performance of the quasi-linear model was good, reaching correlation at the 99\% confidence level; however, it tended to underestimate hysteresis energy (mean relative deviation = -19.1\%) and observed stiffness. This was in part due to difficulties in establishing the physical constants of the quasi-linear model from finite rate relaxation testing. An extrapolation deconvolution technique to enhance the experimentally derived constants was developed, to reduce the detrimental effects of finite rate testing. The quasi-linear model based on this enhanced derivation showed improved predictive ability and hysteresis energy determination.