A CONSTITUTIVE MODEL FOR COMPRESSIBLE ELASTOMERIC SOLIDS

A non-linear thermo-elastic constitutive model for the large deformati ons of isotropic materials is formulated. This model is specialized to account for the physics and thermodynamics of the elastic deformation of rubber-like materials, and based on these molecular considerations a constitutive model for compressible elastomeric solids is proposed. The new constitutive model generalizes the incompressible and isother mal model of Arruda and Boyce (1993) to include the compressibility an d thermal expansion of these materials. The model is fit to existing e xperimental data on vulcanized natural rubbers to determine the materi al parameters for the rubbers examined. The fit between the simple mod el and the data is found to be very good for large stretches and moder ate volume changes.