The mechanical behavior of cartilage tissue plays a crucial role in physiological mechanotransduction processes of chondrocytes and pathological changes like osteoarthritis. Therefore, intensive research activities focus on the identification of implant substitute materials that mechanically mimic the cartilage extracellular matrix. This, however, requires a thorough understanding of the complex mechanical behavior of both native cartilage and potential substitute materials to treat cartilage lesions. Here, we perform complex multi-modal mechanical analyses of human articular cartilage and two surrogate materials, commercially available ChondroFiller_liquid, and oxidized alginate-gelatin (ADA-GEL) hydrogels. We show that all materials exhibit nonlinearity and compression-tension asymmetry. However, while hyaline cartilage yields higher stresses in tension than in compression, ChondroFiller^liquid and ADA-GEL exhibit the opposite trend. These characteristics can be attributed to the materials’ underlying microstructure: Both cartilage and ChondroFiller^liquid contain fibrillar components, but the latter constitutes a bi-phasic structure, where the 60% nonfibrillar hydrogel proportion dominates the mechanical response. Of all materials, ChondroFiller^liquid shows the most pronounced viscous effects. The present study provides important insights into the microstructure-property relationship of cartilage substitute materials, with vital implications for mechanically-driven material design in cartilage engineering. In addition, we provide a data set to create mechanical simulation models in the future.

软骨组织的机械行为在软骨细胞的生理机械转导过程以及诸如骨关节炎等病理变化中起着至关重要的作用。因此，深入的研究活动集中于鉴定机械模拟软骨细胞外基质的植入物替代材料。但是，这需要彻底了解天然软骨和潜在的替代材料治疗软骨病变的复杂机械行为。在这里，我们对人体关节软骨和两种替代材料（可商购的ChondroFiller_液体）进行复杂的多模式力学分析，以及氧化的藻酸盐-明胶（ADA-GEL）水凝胶。我们表明，所有材料都表现出非线性和压缩张力不对称性。但是，尽管透明软骨在拉伸时产生的应力比压缩时要高，但ChondroFiller^液体和ADA-GEL却呈现相反的趋势。这些特性可以归因于材料的潜在微观结构：软骨和软骨填充^液均包含原纤维成分，但后者构成了两相结构，其中60％的非原纤维水凝胶占主导地位的机械响应。在所有材料中，ChondroFiller^液体显示出最明显的粘性效应。本研究为软骨替代材料的微观结构与属性之间的关系提供了重要见解，对软骨工程中机械驱动材料的设计具有重要意义。此外，我们提供了一个数据集，以在将来创建机械仿真模型。