Table 1.

Material properties: Young’s modulus E, Poisson’s ratio v, loss factor η and density ρ. Values that are underlined are discussed in this study.

	TM	Manubrial fold	Lateral process	Anterior ligament	Malleus
E [MPa]	10–40	10% of TM	16000	21a	16000b
v	0.3c	0.49	0.3d	0.3d	0.3d
η	0.01–0.13	Same as TM	0	Same as TM	0
ρ [kg/m3]	1200d	1200d	2200e	1200d	2200e

^aA range of [2.1-21] MPa is used in the literature (Zhao et al., 2009). In our study, 21 MPa gave the best results, although this is not shown in this work.

^bThis value is based upon (Soons et al., 2010).

^cThis value is used in most of the current middle ear FE models (Zhao et al., 2009; Volandri et al., 2011), and can be seen as a compromise between an incompressible material (v = 0.5) and a material composed of parallel fibers with no lateral interaction (v = 0) (Funnell and Laszlo, 1982). We furthermore compared model outcome for this value with the nearly incompressible case (v = 0.49), which showed almost no difference.

^dThese values are used in most of the current middle ear FE models (Volandri et al., 2011).

^eThis value is based upon the reported malleus volume in (Salih et al., 2012) and the reported malleus mass in (Nummela, 1995).