FINITE THERMOELASTICITY OF CONSTRAINED ELASTOMERS SUBJECT TO BIAXIAL LOADING

Well accepted descriptors of the thermoelastic behavior of elastomers undergoing finite strain remain elusive largely due to the continuing lack of appropriate multiaxial data. In this paper we present a new th eoretical framework for inferring thermoelastic constitutive relations directly from biaxial data. In particular, we consider an experimenta lly natural decomposition of the motion into two parts - one due to tr action-free uniform heating and one due to isothermal mechanical loadi ng - and impose a mechanical incompressibility constraint on each moti on. It is shown that, regardless of the order of the motions, one obta ins a thermoelastic generalization of the classical result of Rivlin a nd Saunders for identifying response functions from (isothermal) biaxi al data.