Understanding fracture of a carbon black filled rubber compound using material force theory

Abstract

This paper is based on the determination of important fracture parameters for commercially important rubber blends through experimental and finite element modeling methods. Properties of NR/BR blends, which are mainly suitable for tire applications, of various compositions have been tested under tensile load and the result is utilized to determine the suitable hyperelastic material model. A model proposed by Yeoh has been found to be more relevant to the test materials and is used to represent them in simulation. Single Edge Notched Tensile samples (SENT) are ued for the fracture analysis. The samples are tested for uniaxial Mode I fracture (Tensile), which is the most commonly observed among the three modes of fracture, and crack growth was studied using the Virtual Crack Closure Technique (VCCT). A finite-element replica of the test specimen has been created using in-house code, which uses an implicit mesh adaptive method to study the strain potential around the crack tip. The code for each specimen is executed using the commercially available third-party software ANSYS Parametric Design Language (APDL). The stress–strain behaviors from experimental and simulation responses were compared. The energy release rate otherwise known as tearing energy has been derived for both experimental and numerical tests. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd