Fatigue Life Assessment of Filled Rubber by Hysteresis Induced Self-Heating Temperature

As a viscohyperelastic material, filled rubber is widely used as a damping element in mechanical engineering and vehicle engineering. Academic and industrial researchers commonly need to evaluate the fatigue life of these rubber components under cyclic load, quickly and efficiently. The currently used method for fatigue life evaluation is based on the S–N curve, which requires very long and costly fatigue tests. In this paper, fatigue-to-failure experiments were conducted using an hourglass rubber specimen; during testing, the surface temperature of the specimen was measured with a thermal imaging camera. Due to the hysteresis loss during cyclic deformation, the temperature of the material was found to first rise and then level off to a steady state temperature, and then it rose sharply again as failure approached. The S–N curve in the traditional sense was experimentally determined using the maximum principal strain as the fatigue parameter, and a relationship between the steady state temperature increase and the maximum principal strain was then established. Consequently, the steady state temperature increase was connected with the fatigue life. A couple of thousand cycles was sufficient for the temperature to reach its steady state value during fatigue testing, which was less than one tenth of the fatigue life, so the fatigue life of the rubber component could be efficiently assessed by the steady state temperature increase.