Compression of silicone foams

Abstract

Silicone foams are used as cushions for impact protection. They are soft and will recover from very large deformation with little damage. Understanding their compression behaviors in high performance environments and providing necessary calibration and validation data for constitutive models are highly important. Characterizing these soft materials, however, is quite challenging. In this study, the foam deformation is carefully studied. With a new compression experimental setup, the force and displacement fields at the foam-platen interface are examined in detail. These additional data will be used to compute the compressive stress-stain behavior of the soft material. The experimental method and foams compression results are presented.