Visco-hyperelastic material model fitting to experimental stress–strain curves using a genetic algorithm and its application to soft tissue simulants

Ballistic impacts on human thorax without penetration can produce severe injuries or even death of the carrier. Soft tissue finite element models must capture the non-linear elasticity and strain-rate dependence to accurately estimate the dynamic human mechanical response. The objective of this work is the calibration of a visco-hyperelastic model for soft tissue simulants. Material model parameters have been calculated by fitting experimental stress–strain relations obtained from the literature using genetic algorithms. Several parametric analyses have been carried out during the definition of the optimization algorithm. In this way, we were able to study different optimization strategies to improve the convergence and accuracy of the final result. Finally, the genetic algorithm has been applied to calibrate two different soft tissue simulants: ballistic gelatin and styrene–ethylene–butylene–styrene. The algorithm is able to calculate the constants for visco-hyperelastic constitutive equations with high accuracy. Regarding synthetic stress–strain curves, a short computational time has been shown when using the semi-free strategy, leading to high precision results in stress–strain curves. The algorithm developed in this work, whose code is included as supplementary material for the reader use, can be applied to calibrate visco-hyperelastic parameters from stress–strain relations under different strain rates. The semi-free relaxation time strategy has shown to obtain more accurate results and shorter convergence times than the other strategies studied. It has been also shown that the understanding of the constitutive models and the complexity of the stress–strain objective curves is crucial for the accuracy of the method.