The delayed fracture test for viscoelastic elastomers

Abstract

In a recent contribution, Shrimali and Lopez-Pamies (Extreme Mech Lett 58, 101944, 2023a) have shown that the Griffith criticality condition that governs crack growth in viscoelastic elastomers can be reduced—from its ordinary form involving a historically elusive loading-history-dependent critical tearing energy $$T_c$$ —to a fundamental form that involves exclusively the intrinsic fracture energy $$G_c$$ of the elastomer. The purpose of this paper is to make use of this fundamental form to explain one of the most telltale fracture tests for viscoelastic elastomers, the so-called delayed fracture test.