Evaluation of deformation behavior of carbon-black-filled rubber under cyclic straining

Abstract

We invistigate the characteristic deformation behavior of rubber with carbon black filler. The deformation behaviors of plane strain rubber unit cell contained fillers under combined monotonic and cyclic straining are investigated by computational simulation with the nonaffine molecular chain network model. The results reveal the substantial enhancement of resistance to the macroscopic deformation, which is caused by the remarkable orientation hardening due to the highly localized deformation in the rubber. The disentanglement of molecular chain during the deformation of rubber results the magnification of the hysteresis of the macroscopic stress-strain relations under cyclic straining. Furthermore, we discussed an additional strengthening and hysteresis loss caused by the increase of the volume fraction of filler, the heterogeneity of the distribution of filler and the heterogeneity of initial average number of segments of modecular chains.