Effects of Large Deformation and Velocity Impacts on the Mechanical Behavior of Filled Rubber: Microstructure-Based Constitutive Modeling and Mechanical Testing

Filled rubber has been extensively used in the repairing, retrofitting, and protecting of civil infrastructures due to its superior physical and mechanical properties. However, effects of large deformation and velocity impacts on the mechanical behavior of filled rubber are not well recognized, one of the major challenges in the past investigations is that the material exhibits significant nonlinearity and sensitivity to velocity. This paper presents a hyper-viscoelastic constitutive modeling and experimental study to capture both the hyperelastic and viscoelastic behaviors of filled rubber under large shear deformation and velocity impacts. Motivated by the micro-mechanism of filled rubber, the constitutive modeling consists of an equilibrium element in parallel with an improved Maxwell element to incorporate both nonlinear hyperelasticity and rate-dependent performance governed by the readjustment and rearrangement of molecular chains in the material. A new strain energy function is developed and the physical description of parameters in the strain energy function is highlighted. The Clausius-Duhem inequality is employed to consider the thermodynamic consistency of the model. Then, stress relaxation property and stress-strain response of filled rubber upon cyclic shear loading with different strain rates (ranging from 0.08 to 12.0 s(−1)) are experimentally studied, and some key observations are summarized. Subsequently, a “Gau-Poly” function is proposed based on the experimental data to describe the viscoelastic property of filled rubber versus strain and strain rate. Finally, stress-strain relationship and hysteretic area obtained from the experimental results were compared with the numerical results of the model, good agreement was achieved and the capacity of the model to accurately reproduce the mechanical behavior of filled rubber under a wide range of deformation and velocity impacts was verified.