Fig. 3: Virtual experiments were conducted with the computational framework for cutting soft materials.

a–c.1 Numerical and experimental cutting force versus displacement curves for the gelatin hydrogel, elastomer, and meat-based food material. a–c.2 Stiffness of the sample as the parameter of the neo-Hookean model. a–c.3 Relative error fields of the virtual experiments. The relative error field normalized by the average numerical displacement is computed as \(| {u}_{x,\exp }-{u}_{x\rm{,num}}| /[{N}^{-1}{\sum }_{1}^{N}| {u}_{x\rm{,num}}| ]\) [−] and \(| {u}_{y,\exp }-{u}_{y\rm{,num}}| /[{N}^{-1}{\sum }_{1}^{N}| {u}_{y\rm{,num}}| ]\) [–], and computed for three steps along the cutting process: two during indentation---before the onset of cutting—and one in the cutting regime. a–c.4 Frames of the deformed samples along indentation and cutting in the virtual experiments for the three materials. The cutting model is calibrated with the material parameters, fracture, friction, and viscous parameters in Table 2. All samples have the same cutting length (in the direction of the cutting tool) of 30 mm and height of 21 mm. The gelatin hydrogel and elastomer samples have a width of 30 mm, while the meat-based samples have a width of 25 mm. The error fields are shown for one representative of all experimental repetitions.