Mechanical behaviour of natural cow leather in tension

We study experimentally the microstructure and mechanical behavior of natural cow leather. Tensile tests are performed using leather strips to observe their deformation, creep and failure. It is found that the microstructure of cow leather is a layered, complicated network of fibers of different sizes from a few to a few hundreds of nanometers in diameter. They show nonlinear stress-strain relations and viscoelastic behavior. The effect of humidity is also examined. A simple theoretical model of a multilayered beam is proposed to describe the most basic behavior in tension.