In this paper the inelastic features of stress relaxation, hysteresis and residual strain are combined with the Arruda-Boyce eight-chain model of elasticity, in order to develop a model that is capable of describing the Mullins effect for cyclic stress-softening of an incompressible hyperelastic material, in particular a carbon-filled rubber vulcanizate. We have been unable to identify in the literature any other model that takes into consideration all the above inelastic features of the cyclic stress-softening of carbon-filled rubber. Our model compares favourably with experimental data and gives a good description of stress-softening, hysteresis, stress relaxation, residual strain and creep of residual strain.

In this paper we describe various limited-stretch models of nonlinear rubber elasticity, each dependent on only the first invariant of the left Cauchy-Green strain tensor and having only two independent material constants. The models are described as limited-stretch, or restricted elastic, because the strain energy and stress response become infinite at a finite value of the first invariant. These models describe well the limited stretch of the polymer chains of which rubber is composed. We discuss Gent's model which is the simplest limited-stretch model and agrees well with experiment. We then discuss various statistical models, the one-chain, three-chain, four-chain and Arruda-Boyce eight-chain models, all of which involve the inverse Langevin function. A numerical comparison between the three-chain and eight-chain models is provided. Next, we compare various models which involve approximations to the inverse Langevin function with the exact inverse Langevin function of the eight-chain model. A new approximate model is proposed that is as simple as Cohen's original model but significantly more accurate. We show that effectively the eight-chain model may be regarded as a linear combination of the neo-Hookean and Gent models. Treloar's model is shown to have about half the percentage error of our new model but it is much more complicated. We introduce for completeness a modified Treloar model but this is only slightly more accurate than Treloar's original model. For the deformations of uniaxial tension, biaxial tension, pure shear and simple shear we compare the accuracy of these models, and that of Puso, with the eight-chain model by means of graphs and a table. Our approximations compare extremely well with models frequently used and described in the literature, having the smallest mean percentage error over most of the range of the argument.

This paper models stress softening during cyclic loading and unloading of an elastomer. The paper begins by remodelling the primary loading curve to include a softening function and goes on to derive non-linear transversely isotropic constitutive equations for the elastic response, stress relaxation, residual strain and creep of residual strain. These ideas are combined with a transversely isotropic version of the Arruda-Boyce eight-chain model to develop a constitutive relation that is capable of accurately representing the Mullins effect during cyclic stress-softening for a transversely isotropic, hyperelastic material, in particular a carbon-filled rubber vulcanizate.