ABSTRACT
Rethwisch 2007). In fact in most of the engineering applications, interaction with solvents is one of the factors which contribute to the failure of elastomers (Mars 2001).
A number of works investigating the interaction between diffusion of solvents in stress-free elastomers (Flory 1953; Treloar 1975) and uniaxial large deformation in elastomers (Fukumori et al. 1990; Mostafa et al. 2009; Jerabek et al. 2010; Chai et al. 2011) had been extensively studied. In general it was found that in the case of uniaxially stressed elastomer, tensile stress increases swelling while compressive stress restricts swelling (Chai et al. 2011). Although the effect of uniaxial mechanical loading to swelling is well established, there are no general agreement on the effects of multiaxial mechanical loading on swelling (Mars and Fatemi 2004) due to the difficulty in setting up the experimental works. Thus, specially designed specimen and device need to be developed for this purpose. The present work can be regarded a first attempt to investigate the interaction between diffusion of solvents and multiaxial mechanical loading.
