| Summary: | Skin grafts play an important role in treatment of severe burn injuries. Split-thickness skin grafting is one of the most common grafting technique, in which, parallel incision patterns are projected onto a small portion of excised skin for generating expansions and covering a larger burn site. However, to date, expansions reported through experiments on such grafts, have been much lower than claimed, which inhibits their application in severe burn injury mitigation. In this work, novel skin graft simulants were developed to study the expansion potential of skin grafts with I-shaped auxetic incision patterns. A range of I-shape dimensional parameters were tested, and the effective Poisson's effect, meshing ratios, and generated stresses, biaxial deformation and stress were estimated across all skin graft simulants, with strain loadings up to 200%. High spacing between I-shaped unit cells, was found to generate high negative Poisson's ratio and meshing ratio (MR). With high spacing, lowest stresses were generated for the maximum edge lengths of the I-shape. Maximum negative Poisson's ratio of -1.12 and meshing ratio of 3.84 were produced by the skin graft simulants, indicating expansions much higher than traditional skin grafts. Such results have not been realized with skin grafts to date, which would be indispensable for further research into skin graft expansions and treatment of severe burn injuries.
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