Hot cracks in rubber: origin of the giant toughness of rubberlike materials

Synergistic Effect of Styrene and Carbon Black on the Fatigue Properties of Styrene-Butadiene Rubber Composites

The increase in the styrene content in styrene-butadiene rubber (SBR) can improve the abrasion performance and cutting resistance of rubber, which has received attention in the tire industry. The fatigue performance is the main evaluation index of rubber materials applied to tires. In this study, the effect of the styrene content and its interaction with carbon black (CB) on the dynamic fatigue performance and mechanism of SBR were investigated. The results indicated that the dynamic fatigue life of the rubber composite materials was prolonged with increasing styrene content; furthermore, it showed a trend of increasing and then decreasing with increasing CB content. At a certain CB content, styrene and CB displayed a synergistic effect on improving the dynamic fatigue life of the composite materials. The dynamic fatigue performance of SBR40/CB20 was the best. The expansion of the fatigue cracks followed the secondary cracking mechanism, which consumed a large amount of strain energy and slowed the development of the main crack. However, when the CB content exceeded 40 phr, the mechanism transformed to main crack self-propagation and the fatigue life decreased.

Heat Emitting Damage in Skin: A Thermal Pathway for Mechanical Algesia

Mechanical pain (or mechanical algesia) can both be a vital mechanism warning us for dangers or an undesired medical symptom important to mitigate. Thus, a comprehensive understanding of the different mechanisms responsible for this type of pain is paramount. In this work, we study the tearing of porcine skin in front of an infrared camera, and show that mechanical injuries in biological tissues can generate enough heat to stimulate the neural network. In particular, we report local temperature elevations of up to 24°C around fast cutaneous ruptures, which shall exceed the threshold of the neural nociceptors usually involved in thermal pain. Slower fractures exhibit lower temperature elevations, and we characterise such dependency to the damaging rate. Overall, we bring experimental evidence of a novel—thermal—pathway for direct mechanical algesia. In addition, the implications of this pathway are discussed for mechanical hyperalgesia, in which a role of the cutaneous thermal sensors has priorly been suspected. We also show that thermal dissipation shall actually account for a significant portion of the total skin's fracture energy, making temperature monitoring an efficient way to detect biological damages.

CRACK PROPAGATION BEHAVIOR OF LATERALLY CONSTRAINED POLYMERS USED AS DIELECTRIC ELASTOMERS

Dielectric elastomer-based transducers are rapidly gaining importance with the syntheses of new polymers that can potentially be used as dielectric materials. However, these materials are always prone to fracture in the presence of cracks and flaws. Failures originate from flaws (or notches), and a complete fracture may take place due to the propagation of cracks. The present work investigates the crack propagation behavior of two popular polymers, VHB 4910 and Ecoflex, that are widely used as dielectric elastomers. In this case, tensile loadings in laterally constrained boundary conditions are considered. The average crack propagation speed for Ecoflex is higher than that for VHB, implying that Ecoflex will fail earlier than that of VHB under similar conditions. Moreover, with increasing notch lengths at a fixed strain rate, the average crack propagation speed decreases appreciably but becomes constant for comparatively larger notches. The results also conclude that the average crack propagation speed and normalized crack tip diameter remain higher for VHB than for Ecoflex for larger normalized notch lengths. It is observed that the average crack propagation speed increases with strain rates, whereas the normalized crack tip diameter is independent of strain rates. Experimental results obtained here will provide a useful comparative insight to understand the failure behavior of two polymers widely used as dielectric elastomers.

Thermal dissipation as both the strength and weakness of matter. A material failure prediction by monitoring creep

In any domain involving some stressed solids, that is, from seismology to general engineering, the strength of matter is a paramount feature to understand. We here discuss the ability of a simple thermally activated sub-critical model, which includes the auto-induced thermal evolution of cracks tips, to predict the catastrophic failure of a vast range of materials. It is in particular shown that the intrinsic surface energy barrier, for breaking the atomic bonds of many solids, can be easily deduced from the slow creeping dynamics of a crack. This intrinsic barrier is however higher than the macroscopic load threshold at which brittle matter brutally fails, possibly as a result of thermal activation and of a thermal weakening mechanism. We propose a novel method to compute this macroscopic energy release rate of rupture, Ga, solely from monitoring slow creep, and we show that this reproduces the experimental values within 50% accuracy over twenty different materials, and over more than four decades of fracture energy.

A simple model for viscoelastic crack propagation

 When a crack propagates in a viscoelastic solid, energy dissipation can occur very far from the crack tip where the stress field may be very different from the [Formula: see text] singular form expected close to the crack tip. Most theories of crack propagation focus on the near crack tip region. Remarkable, here I show that a simple theory which does not account for the nature of the stress field in the near crack tip region results in a crack propagation energy in semiquantitative agreement with a theory based on the stress field in the near crack tip region. I consider both opening and closing crack propagation and show that for closing crack propagation in viscoelastic solids, some energy dissipation processes must occur in the crack tip process zone. The theory is illustrated by new experimental results for the adhesive interaction between a silica glass ball and a silicone rubber surface.

How heat controls fracture: the thermodynamics of creeping and avalanching cracks

While of paramount importance in material science, the dynamics of cracks still lacks a complete physical explanation. The transition from their slow creep behavior to a fast propagation regime is a notable key, as it leads to full material failure if the size of a fast avalanche reaches that of the system. We here show that a simple thermodynamics approach can actually account for such complex crack dynamics, and in particular for the non-monotonic force-velocity curves commonly observed in mechanical tests on various materials. We consider a thermally activated failure process that is coupled with the production and the diffusion of heat at the fracture tip. In this framework, the rise in temperature only affects the sub-critical crack dynamics and not the mechanical properties of the material. We show that this description can quantitatively reproduce the rupture of two different polymeric materials (namely, the mode I opening of polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) plates, and the peeling of pressure sensitive adhesive (PSA) tapes), from the very slow to the very fast fracturing regimes, over seven to nine decades of crack propagation velocities. In particular, the fastest regime is obtained with an increase of temperature of thousands of Kelvins, on the molecular scale around the crack tip. Although surprising, such an extreme temperature is actually consistent with different experimental observations that accompany the fast propagation of cracks, namely, fractoluminescence (i.e., the emission of visible light during rupture) and a complex morphology of post-mortem fracture surfaces, which could be due to the sublimation of bubbles.

Crack-Tip Strain Field in Supershear Crack of Elastomers

We characterize the crack-tip strain field in the high-speed (supershear) crack in the elastomers propagating faster than the shear wave speed of sound (C_s). The dependence of steady-state crack velocity (V) on input tearing energy exhibits a crossover at V ≈ C_s between the subsonic (V < C_s) and supershear cracks (V > C_s). Several features of the crack-tip strain field such as strain-magnitude, extent boundary, and singularity exponent also change substantially accompanying the transition from subsonic to supershear cracks. The definite crossover of these characteristics at V ≈ C_s reflects the variations in the crack-growth mechanism: The inertia effect comes into play in the supershear crack. We also demonstrate that the azimuthal distribution of the local crack-tip strain has a close correlation with the macroscopic crack-tip shape, regardless of the regime of V.

Rolling friction of elastomers: role of strain softening

We study the temperature and velocity dependency of rolling friction. Steel and PMMA cylinders are rolled on sheets of nitrile butadiene rubber (NBR), with and without filler, and fluoroelastomer (FKM) with filler. Measurements of the rolling friction are performed for temperatures between -40 °C and 20 °C, and for velocities between 5 μm s^-1 and 0.5 cm s^-1. For the unfilled NBR, a smooth rolling friction master curve is obtained using the bulk viscoelastic frequency-temperature shift factor a_T. For the filled rubber compounds, a small deviation from the bulk viscoelastic shift factor is observed at low temperatures. The experimental data are analyzed using an analytical theory of rolling friction. For the filled compounds, good agreement with theory is obtained when strain softening is included, which increases the rolling friction by a factor ∼2 for the filled FKM and ∼3 for the filled NBR compounds. For the unfilled NBR, the maximum of the rolling friction occurs at higher sliding speeds than predicted by the theory. We discuss the role of the adhesive (crack-opening) contribution to the rolling friction, and the role of frozen-in elastic deformations as the rubber is cooled down below the rubber glass transition temperature.

Adhesion and Friction for Three Tire Tread Compounds

We study the adhesion and friction for three tire tread rubber compounds. The adhesion study is for a smooth silica glass ball in contact with smooth sheets of the rubber in dry condition and in water. The friction studies are for rubber sliding on smooth glass, concrete, and asphalt road surfaces. We have performed the Leonardo da Vinci-type friction experiments and experiments using a linear friction tester. On the asphalt road, we also performed vehicle breaking distance measurements. The linear and non-linear viscoelastic properties of the rubber compounds were measured in shear and tension modes using two different Dynamic Mechanical Analysis (DMA) instruments. The surface topography of all surfaces was determined using stylus measurements and scanned-in silicon rubber replicas. The experimental data were analyzed using the Persson contact mechanics and rubber friction theory.

Rubber contact mechanics: adhesion, friction and leakage of seals

We study the adhesion, friction and leak rate of seals for four different elastomers: Acrylonitrile Butadiene Rubber (NBR), Ethylene Propylene Diene (EPDM), Polyepichlorohydrin (GECO) and Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). Adhesion between smooth clean glass balls and all the elastomers is studied both in the dry state and in water. In water, adhesion is observed for the NBR and PDMS elastomers, but not for the EPDM and GECO elastomers, which we attribute to the differences in surface energy and dewetting. The leakage of water is studied with rubber square-ring seals squeezed against sandblasted glass surfaces. Here we observe a strongly non-linear dependence of the leak rate on the water pressure ΔP for the elastomers exhibiting adhesion in water, while the leak rate depends nearly linearly on ΔP for the other elastomers. We attribute the non-linearity to some adhesion-related phenomena, such as dewetting or the (time-dependent) formation of gas bubbles, which blocks fluid flow channels. Finally, rubber friction is studied at low sliding speeds using smooth glass and sandblasted glass as substrates, both in the dry state and in water. The measured friction coefficients are compared to theory, and the origin of the frictional shear stress acting in the area of real contact is discussed. The NBR rubber, which exhibits the strongest adhesion both in the dry state and in water, also shows the highest friction both in the dry state and in water.

Exactly solvable model for a velocity jump observed in crack propagation in viscoelastic solids

Needs to impart appropriate elasticity and high toughness to viscoelastic polymer materials are ubiquitous in industries such as concerning automobiles and medical devices. One of the major problems to overcome for toughening is catastrophic failure linked to a velocity jump, i.e., a sharp transition in the velocity of crack propagation occurred in a narrow range of the applied load. However, its physical origin has remained an enigma despite previous studies over 60 years. Here, we propose an exactly solvable model that exhibits the velocity jump incorporating linear viscoelasticity with a cutoff length for a continuum description. With the exact solution, we elucidate the physical origin of the velocity jump: it emerges from a dynamic glass transition in the vicinity of the propagating crack tip. We further quantify the velocity jump together with slow- and fast-velocity regimes of crack propagation, which would stimulate the development of tough polymer materials.

The effect of surface roughness and viscoelasticity on rubber adhesion

Adhesion between silica glass or acrylic balls and silicone elastomers and various industrial rubbers is investigated. The work of adhesion during pull-off is found to strongly vary depending on the system, which we attribute to the two opposite effects: (1) viscoelastic energy dissipation close to an opening crack tip and (2) surface roughness. Introducing surface roughness on the glass ball is found to increase the work of adhesion for soft elastomers, while for the stiffer elastomers it results in a strong reduction in the work of adhesion. For the soft silicone elastomers a strong increase in the work of adhesion with increasing pull-off velocity is observed, which may result from the non-adiabatic processes associated with molecular chain pull-out. In general, the work of adhesion is decreased after repeated contacts due to the transfer of molecules from the elastomers to the glass ball. Thus, extracting the free chains (oligomers) from the silicone elastomers is shown to make the work of adhesion independent of the number of contacts. The viscoelastic properties (linear and nonlinear) of all of the rubber compounds are measured, and the velocity dependent crack opening propagation energy at the interface is calculated. Silicone elastomers show a good agreement between the measured work of adhesion and the predicted results, but carbon black filled hydrogenated nitrile butadiene rubber compounds reveal that strain softening at the crack tip may play an important role in determining the work of adhesion. Additionally, adhesion measurement under submerged conditions in distilled water and water + soap solutions are also performed: a strong reduction in the work of adhesion is measured for the silicone elastomers submerged in water, and a complete elimination of adhesion is found for the water + soap solution attributed to an osmotic repulsion between the negatively charged surface of the glass and the elastomer.

How cracks are hot and cool: a burning issue for paper

Material failure is accompanied by important heat exchange, with extremely high temperature - thousands of degrees - reached at crack tips. Such a temperature may subsequently alter the mechanical properties of stressed solids, and finally facilitate their rupture. Thermal runaway weakening processes could indeed explain stick-slip motions and even be responsible for deep earthquakes. Therefore, to better understand catastrophic rupture events, it appears crucial to establish an accurate energy budget of fracture propagation from a clear measure of various energy dissipation sources. In this work, combining analytical calculations and numerical simulations, we directly relate the temperature field around a moving crack tip to the part α of mechanical energy converted into heat. By monitoring the slow crack growth in paper sheets using an infrared camera, we measure a significant fraction α = 12% ± 4%. Besides, we show that (self-generated) heat accumulation could weaken our samples by microfiber combustion, and lead to a fast crack/dynamic failure/regime.

Velocity transition in the crack growth dynamics of filled elastomers: Contributions of nonlinear viscoelasticity

The crack growth dynamics of the carbon-black (CB) filled elastomers is studied experimentally and analyzed while focusing on both kinetics and crack tip profiles. The CB amounts are varied to change the mechanical properties of the elastomers. Static crack growth measurements simultaneously reveal the discontinuous-like transition of the crack growth rate v between the "slow mode" (v≈10^{-5}-10^{-3} m/s) and "fast mode" (v≈10^{-1}-10^{2} m/s) in a narrow range of the input tearing energy Γ and the accompanying changes in the crack tip profiles from blunt to sharp shapes. The crack tip profiles are characterized by two specific parameters, i.e., the deviation δ from the parabolic profile and the opening displacement a in the loading direction. The analysis based on the linear and weakly nonlinear elasticity theories of fracture dynamics demonstrates that the Γ dependence of δ and a is simply classified into three groups depending on the mode (slow or fast) and the magnitudes of δ, independent of CB volume fractions. The theories well explain the results in the slow and fast modes with small magnitudes of δ, while they fail to describe the data in the fast mode with large magnitudes of δ, where the contributions of the strong nonlinearity and/or energy dissipation become significant. The correlation between a power-law relationship Γ∼v^{α} observed in the fast mode and the linear viscoelasticity spectrum is also discussed. The correlation in elastomers with low CB volume fractions is quantitatively explained by the theory of Persson and Brener [Phys. Rev. E 71, 036123 (2005)PLEEE81539-375510.1103/PhysRevE.71.036123], whereas the deviation from the theory becomes appreciable for elastomers with higher CB volume fractions which exhibit strong nonlinear viscoelasticity.

Crack growth mechanism of styrene-butadiene rubber filled with silica nanoparticles studied by small angle X-ray scattering

Crack growth mechanism of styrene-butadiene rubber influenced by silica nanoparticles.

Strong dynamical effects during stick-slip adhesive peeling

We consider the classical problem of the stick-slip dynamics observed when peeling a roller adhesive tape at a constant velocity. From fast imaging recordings, we extract the dependence of the stick and slip phase durations on the imposed peeling velocity and peeled ribbon length. Predictions of Maugis and Barquins [in Adhesion 12, edited by K. W. Allen, Elsevier ASP, London, 1988, pp. 205-222] based on a quasistatic assumption succeed to describe quantitatively our measurements of the stick phase duration. Such a model however fails to predict the full stick-slip cycle duration, revealing strong dynamical effects during the slip phase.

Crack growth mechanism of natural rubber under fatigue loading studied by a real-time crack tip morphology monitoring method

Tear energy dependence of NR crack tip morphology.

Adhesion failure at 180,000 frames per second: direct observation of the detachment process of a mushroom-shaped adhesive

Nature has successfully evolved the mushroom-shaped contact geometry in many organisms in order to solve the attachment problem. We studied the detachment process of individual bioinspired artificial mushroom-shaped adhesive microstructures (MSAMSs) resolving the failure dynamics at high spatiotemporal resolution. The experimental data provide strong evidence for a homogeneous stress distribution in MSAMS, which was recently proposed. Our results allow us to explain the advantage of such contact geometry and provide a suggestion for the widely observed mushroom-shaped contact geometry.

Rubber friction: comparison of theory with experiment

We have measured the friction force acting on a rubber block slid on a concrete surface. We used both unfilled and filled (with carbon black) styrene butadiene (SB) rubber and have varied the temperature from -10 °C to 100 °C and the sliding velocity from 1 μm/s to 1000 μm/s. We find that the experimental data at different temperatures can be shifted into a smooth master-curve, using the temperature-frequency shifting factors obtained from measurements of the bulk viscoelastic modulus. The experimental data has been analyzed using a theory which takes into account the contributions to the friction from both the substrate asperity-induced viscoelastic deformations of the rubber, and from shearing the area of real contact. For filled SB rubber the frictional shear stress σ(f) in the area of real contact results mainly from the energy dissipation at the opening crack on the exit side of the rubber-asperity contact regions. For unfilled rubber we instead attribute σ(f) to shearing of a thin rubber smear film, which is deposited on the concrete surface during run in. We observe very different rubber wear processes for filled and unfilled SB rubber, which is consistent with the different frictional processes. Thus, the wear of filled SB rubber results in micrometer-sized rubber particles which accumulate as dry dust, which is easily removed by blowing air on the concrete surface. This wear process seams to occur at a steady rate. For unfilled rubber a smear film forms on the concrete surface, which cannot be removed even using a high-pressure air stream. In this case the wear rate appears to slow down after some run in time period.

Theory of powdery rubber wear

Rubber wear typically involves the removal of small rubber particles from the rubber surface. On surfaces with not too sharp roughness, e.g. most road surfaces, this involves (slow) crack propagation. In this paper I shall present a theory of mild rubber wear. I shall derive the distribution of wear particle sizes Φ(D), which is in excellent agreement with experiment. I shall also show that the calculated wear rate is consistent with experimental data for tire tread block wear.