Mullins damage effect on rubber products with residual strain

作者：Luo Robert Keqi^*

来源：International Journal of Damage Mechanics, 2015, 24(2): 153-167.

DOI：10.1177/1056789514522504

• Rubber design
• rebound resilience
• Mullins effect
• damage
• residual strain

In industry, the important design parameters of rubber products are currently based on only the loading part of loading-unloading histories, e.g. load-deflection and the fatigue requirement. Rubber-like materials exhibit an appreciable change in their mechanical properties during the loading-unloading process, especially in the first few cycles from a virgin state. There is neither a universally well-defined approach to evaluate the Mullins damage effect on design aspects in industry, nor a reliable criterion to evaluate it for rubber products. An approach based on rebound energy (resilience) change is proposed to predict the Mullins damage effect with residual strain. A rubber product, manufactured in industry, was selected for experiment and verification. A Mullins indicator, in term of the maximum loading forces over the accumulated residual deflections over the loading-unloading cycles, is proposed for a criterion to evaluate the Mullins damage effect. It is indicated that the first loading-unloading cycle removes the Mullins effect by approximately 80% and a typical three loading-unloading cycles in industrial practice can remove Mullins effect by approximately 94%. More than three loading-unloading cycles are suggested to reach a state for achieving the required accuracy on smaller tolerance of design parameters. The proposed approach provides the reliable prediction on the first loading-unloading and subsequent reloading-unloading cycles, and can be used for engineering design and industrial applications. Nevertheless, the proposed approach should be further verified using more industrial cases.

• 出版日期2015-3