Constitutive modelling of the amplitude and frequency dependency of filled elastomers utilizing a modified Boundary Surface Model

A phenomenological uniaxial model is derived for implementation in the time domain, which captures the amplitude and frequency dependency of filled elastomers. Motivated by the experimental observation that the frequency dependency is stronger for smaller strain amplitudes than for large ones, a novel material model is presented. It utilizes a split of deformation between a generalized Maxwell chain in series with a bounding surface plasticity model with a vanishing elastic region. Many attempts to capture the behaviour of filled elastomers are found in the literature, which often utilize an additive split between an elastic and a history dependent element, in parallel. Even though some models capture the storage and loss modulus during sinusoidal excitations, they often fail to do so for more complex load histories. Simulations with the derived model are compared to measurements in simple shear on a compound of carbon black filled natural rubber used in driveline isolators in the heavy truck industry. The storage and loss modulus from simulations agree very well with measurements, using only 7 material parameters to capture 2 decades of strain (0.5-50% shear strain) and frequency (0.2-20 Hz). More importantly, with material parameters extracted from the measured storage and loss modulus, measurements of a dual sine excitation are well replicated. This enables realistic operating conditions to be simulated early in the development process, before an actual prototype is available for testing, since the loads in real life operating conditions frequently are a combination of many harmonics. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.