Direction dependent orthotropic model for Mullins materials

Abstract

The motivating key for this work was the absence of a phenomenological model that can reasonably predict a variety of non-proportional experimental data on the anisotropic Mullins effect for different types of rubber-like materials. Hence, in this paper, we propose a purely phenomenological direction dependent orthotropic model that can describe the anisotropic Mullins behaviour with permanent set and, has orthotropic invariants that have a clear physical interpretation. The formulation is based on an orthotropic principal axis theory recently developed for nonlinear elastic problems. A damage function and a direction dependent damage parameter are introduced in the formulation to facilitate the analysis of anisotropic stress softening in rubber-like materials. A direction dependent free energy function, written explicitly in terms of principal stretches, is postulated. The proposed theory is able to predict and compares well with experimental data available in the literature for different types of rubberlike materials.