Stress-Strain Measurements and Viscoelastic Response of Blood Vessels Cryopreserved by Vitrification

To gain increased insight into thermo-mechanical phenomena during cryopreservation, tensile stress relaxation experiments were conducted on vitrified blood vessels (vitreous in Latin means Glassy), and the results compared with various viscoelastic models. Using a recently presented device, isothermal stress-relaxation results were obtained for a bovine carotid artery model, permeated with the cryoprotectant cocktail VS55 and a reference solution of 7.05 M DMSO. After a rapidly applied tensile strain, experimental results display exponential decay of stress with time; the stress at a given time increases with decreasing specimen temperature. Among the viscoelastic models investigated, the Williams–Landel–Ferry model was found to best-fit the variation of the stress relaxation data with temperature, while a Maxwell–Weichert model is used to represent the exponential decay of the stress with time. Blood vessel properties were found to dominate at temperatures above roughly −100 °C, while the properties of the cryoprotectant dominate below this temperature. A suitably defined steady-state viscosity displayed a similar behavior for both cryoprotectants, when normalized with respect to the cryoprotectant glass transition temperature.