A constitutive model for carbon black filled rubber: Experimental investigations and mathematical representation

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The stress-strain behavior of carbon black filled rubber is recognized to be nonlinearly elastic in its main part (see e.g. Gent [1]). In addition, inelastic effects occur under monotonic and cyclic processes. The inelastic behavior includes nonlinear rate dependence as well as equilibrium hysteresis. Moreover, the first periods of a stress-strain curve differ significantly from the shape of subsequent cycles; a characteristic feature, which is called the Mullins effect, because it has been pointed out by Mullins [2]. All inelastic phenomena are strongly influenced by the volume fraction of the filler particles (see e.g. Payne [3], So and Chen [4], Meinecke and Taftaf [5]).

The aim of the present paper is to design a constitutive model, representing this kind of material behavior as a phenomenological theory of continuum mechanics. In order to motivate the basic structure of the constitutive theory, a series of uniaxial experiments between 100% in tension and 30% in compression are presented and analyzed. First of all, monotonic strain controlled experiments show the nonlinear rate dependence of the stress response. Then, a series of inserted relaxation periods at constant strain yields the monotonic equilibrium stress-strain curve, which is strongly nonlinear and unsymmetric with respect to the origin. Finally, cyclic experiments under strain control display pronounced hysteresis behavior. The hysteresis effects are mainly rate dependent, but there exists also a weak equilibrium hysteresis (compare to similar observations of Orschall and Peeken [6]). The Mullins effect corresponds to a softening phenomenon during the first few cycles. By means of an appropriate preprocess, this effect was excluded during the above experiments. Apart from the Mullins effect, neither hardening nor significant softening phenomena were observed in the context of cyclic loadings.

These results motivate the structure of a constitutive model of finite strain viscoplasticity: The total stress is decomposed into an equilibrium stress and an overstress, where the overstress is a rate dependent functional of the strain history. The overstress represents the rate dependence of the material behavior and tends asymptotically to zero during relaxation processes. The nonlinearity of the rate dependence is incorporated by means of a stress dependent relaxation time. The equilibrium stress is assumed to be a rate independent functional of the strain history. For this quantity, we make use of an arclength representation, which was originally introduced by Valanis [7]. In case of vanishing equilibrium hysteresis and vanishing rate dependence our constitutive model reduces to finite strain hyperelasticity, which is the first approximation of the constitutive properties. In more general cases the “main shape” of a stress-strain curve is determined by hyperelasticity, superimposed by rate dependent and equilibrium hysteresis. The representation of the Mullins effect is incorporated by a continuum damage model.

Some numerical simulations at the end of the paper demonstrate that the presented theory is able to represent the observed phenomena qualitatively and quantitatively with sufficient approximation.