A continuum model for tension-compression asymmetry in skeletal muscle

Experiments on passive skeletal muscle on different species show a strong asymmetry in the observed tension-compression mechanical behavior. This asymmetry shows that the tension modulus is two orders of magnitude higher than the compression modulus. Until now, traditional analytical constitutive models have been unable to capture that strong asymmetry in anisotropic solids using the same material parameters. In this work we present a model which is able to accurately capture five experimental tests in chicken pectoralis muscle, including the observed tension-compression asymmetry. However, aspects of the anisotropy of the tissue are not captured by the model.