ABSTRACT
Durability and a stable high quality of a rubber product are of vital interest because of its significance in technical systems. This chapter employs a new approach of current fracture mechanics research to rubber material – the so-called method of material forces. With this approach at hand, a very efficient and elegant methodology to evaluate fracture characteristics of rubber components is available. The material force at a crack tip yields the energy release rate as fracture mechanical parameter. Moreover, a vector quantity, in analogy to a physical force, is obtained that can be identified with the direction of largest crack sensitivity and with largest energy release rate. The fundamental theoretical formulations of this approach are developed for the constitutive properties of rubber (finite elasticity, damage, inelasticity) and, additionally, the required developments in the context of the finite element method are mentioned.
