A new approach to describe the elastic behavior of filled rubber-like materials under complex uniaxial loading

Abstract

The construction of a model capable of describing viscoelastic behavior of rubber-like materials is a challenging problem. Although this task can be simplified, if we restrict our consideration only to elastic behavior of the material, excluding all temporary (rate-dependent) effects. In practice, it can be achieved by testing polymer samples at very low loading rates. However, our research is devoted to the performance of complex experiments on uniaxial cyclic loading with different degrees of deformation of the samples, in which the arising stresses are considered as the sum of equilibrium (elastic) and dissipative (inelastic) terms. A series of experiments have been carried out on the samples of materials, which have identical matrices (styrene-butadiene rubber) but different degrees of filling with carbon black. The result of our research is the construction of a constitutive model, which can describe the elastic behavior of rubber-like materials taking account of the Mullins softening effect.