Effect of Cord Construction on the Properties of Rubber Composites

Abstract

Cord-rubber composites are different from the general rigid-matrix composites because of the twisted nature of cords and the large, nonlinear deformation of rubber material. The study of the effect of cord construction on their mechanical properties is essential to the improvement of the performance characteristics of rubber products. However, little work was concerned with the influence of the number of strands of cord. The present work demonstrated that influence by using nonlinear finite element analyses. The calculated results show that the effective moduli of the twisted cord reinforced composites tend to be closer to that of a single strand of cord reinforced composites when increasing the number of strands with a constant cord volume fraction. For three types of reinforcing cords, the shear stresses have a symmetric distribution and an anti-symmetric distribution in the condition of in-plane shearing and axial loading, respectively. It is also found that the minimum MISS (maximum interfacial shear stress) occurs in the case of a single strand of cord in comparison with the cases of the twisted cords, and the maximum MISS is related to the loading conditions and the number of strands.