A New Constitutive Model for Rubber-Like Materials

Abstract

The present work presents initially a study on the strain energy expressions for several constitutive models for incompressible elastomers published in the literature. Departing from a critical analysis of the key terms in the strain energy expressions of the models which show the best overall performance for incompressible rubbers, a new family of hyperelastic models is proposed. The proposed strain energy function keeps both, the terms responsible for capturing the stiffening under high strains, and the terms which represent the characteristic oscilation in the stress vs. strain curve under small strains. Results are presented for several strain regimes, and compared with other well known models.