ABSTRACT
Rubber materials are used in many technical applications, where durability and reliability is of great importance. The reliability is usually proved by life cycle experiments or by numerical simulations. Usually, theoretical and numerical durability analyses are based on empirical criteria as well as on fracture mechanical considerations. The latter class of approaches has a physical foundation and represents the state of the art in durability investigations for pure and reinforced elastomeric structures. The so-called material force method, which is a novel approach to compute the energy release rate, is employed efficiently as a post-processing step following a standard finite element simulation. The material force concept is a new method to determine the energy release rate. This method is present state of the art in fracture mechanics, since the material forces are a more efficient means to compute the energy release rate than the classical methods, e.g. the J-integral.
