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Characterizing viscoelastic properties of soft biomimetic membranes has become increasingly important due to their biomedical applications such as tissue engineering/regenerative medicine and biosensors. This paper presents a new micro-shaft-poking (MSP) technique which is free from the complication of substrate backing, normally occurred as an intractable problem in the conventional indentation testing for soft membranes. A tailored indention apparatus with a spherical indenter was constructed to achieve the force resolution and displacement of 1μN and 1μm. The biomimetic membranes which were used for mechanical testing were made of two types of hydrogel, alginate and agarose. The results showed that the elastic modulus increased with gel concentration. A creep test has also been conducted to examine the timedependent behaviors of various hydrogel and a viscoelastic model has been correspondingly developed and applied to describe the experimental results. Other potential applications of this new instrument to other membranes, both artificial and biological, have been addressed in the paper.

MICRO-SHAFT-POKING - A Novel Instrument for Mechanically Characterizing Soft Biomimetic Membrance