Internal Rupture of Bonded Rubber Cylinders in Tension

Abstract

An unusual rupture process is described. It consists of the sudden appearance of internal cracks in bonded rubber cylinders at a well-defined and comparatively small tensile load. The cracks occur in all the vulcanizates examined, and in particularly weak rubbers are found to cause failure. Their appearance may also lead to marked changes in the load-deflection relationship. A theoretical treatment is presented on the basis of a proposed criterion for crack formation. It is assumed that they form when the negative hydrostatic pressure component of the applied stress reaches a critical value. It is shown by means of the theory of large elastic deformations that a critical value of the negative pressure exists at which any cavity in the rubber will burst, and the calculated value is shown to be in satisfactory agreement with experiment. Moreover, the theory successfully predicts the observed dependence of the cracking stress on the Young's modulus of the rubber, its virtual independence of the rubber strength and extensibility, and the general form of the observed variation of cracking stress and crack disposition with the thickness of the testpiece.

Cavitation for incompressible anisotropic nonlinearly elastic spheres

“…Tvergaard [34] for a recent review of void growth in metals.) Sudden void formation ("cavitation") in vulcanized rubber has also been observed experimentally by Gent and Lindley [11]. (See also Williams and Schapery [37].)…”

Discontinuous energy minimizers in nonlinear elastostatics: an example of J. Ball revisited

“…* Indeed, for a compressible punctured ball one would expect that a path of uniform dilatation cannot be statically continued beyond a critical value of the boundary displacement 01, where a snapthrough transition takes place with sudden increase of the central cavity perhaps accompanied by unbounded circumferential stress. In this connection, see also the remarks of Ball [1] on the work of Gent and Lindley [8].…”

“…Moreover, he discusses how the classes of materials, both compressible and incompressible, to which his analysis applies are related to other materials of interest, e.g., the compressible materials introduced by Ogden [9]; not only that, he compares his results, as far as possible, with the theoretical and experimental results of others, chiefly those of Gent and Lindley [8]. Overall, by the thoroughness and sharpness of both the analytical results and the accompanying discussion, the reader of [1] is left under the impression that perhaps the basic ingredients of a new theory of nonlinear elastic fracture have been put together, a theory of fracture by loss of smoothness of solutions at a critical value of the boundary datum.…”

Void formation and growth in a class of compressible solids

“…The experimental observation of void formation in vulcanized rubber was reported in 1958 (cf. Gent and Lindley [8]). After the publication of a fundamental paper by John Ball [9] in 1982 an extensive mathematical study of this problem arose (cf.…”