Sealing capability and hyperelastic behaviour of silicone biocomposites via compression test

Abstract

Due to the excellent chemical flexibility and elastic properties of silicone rubber, Arenga pinnata‐silicone rubber biocomposites were introduced as a candidate for sealing applications. Its sealing properties were investigated via compressive properties between oil soaked and unsoaked specimens. Compression test based on ASTM D395 was employed to obtain the compression sets and its material constants are acquired using hyperelastic material models i. e. Neo‐Hookean and Mooney‐Rivlin models. Unsoaked specimens consist of 0 wt %, 4 wt %, 8 wt % and 16 wt % fibre content while for soaked specimens, only those with 0 wt % (lowest) and 16 wt % (highest) were prepared for comparison purposes. The results indicated that 16 wt % soaked specimens exhibit the highest compressive stress compared to both soaked and unsoaked 0 wt % specimens, while the compression sets of both 0 wt % and 16 wt % soaked specimens showed lower values compared to all unsoaked specimens. Using hyperelastic material models, the 16 wt % soaked specimens indicated higher material constants than unsoaked specimens while pure silicone showed the opposite. Thus, this study has found that the silicone biocomposites have the capability in sealing applications as its compressive stress shows superior properties especially for soaked specimens compared to pure silicone rubber.

Physical and mechanical properties of bamboo-silicone biocomposites (BaSiCs)

“…The samples that were tested after they were immersed in the seawater had lower compression set values than the samples that were not immersed in the seawater. This suggests that as the fiber composition of the BaSiC increases, the elasticity of the silicone rubber chain mobility decreases, and the compression set value increases as a result of the higher matrix stiffness (Bahrain et al 2017). Therefore, the stiffness of the BaSiC samples increased as the bamboo fiber content increased.…”

“…In recent years, composite industries have focused on the use natural fibers rather than synthetic fibers because of their biodegradable properties and environmentally friendly nature (Arpitha and Yogesha 2017). Previous studies have found that the reinforcement of silicone rubber with Arenga pinnata (Bahrain et al 2017), kenaf (Nishino et al 2003;Ismail et al 2019), and banana fibres (Amir et al 2017) can maintain the material properties, which can offer many benefits. Natural materials based on cellulosic fibers have been commonly used in recent studies compared to other types of fiber because of their wide availability, strong mechanical properties, and relatively low cost (Ganicz et al 2020).…”

Study on characterization methods of the deformation properties of soft material polydimethylsiloxane using the indentation test

“…Up to now, many works have been carried out on the indentation test of soft materials [31][32][33][34]. The results are usually related to various factors, such as different shape indenters (pyramidal indenter, spherical indenter and flat-ended indenter), load and material thickness [35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46]. The indentation test on polydimethylsiloxane was carried out to characterize its mechanical properties using the pyramidal indenter and spherical indenter [47].…”