ABSTRACT
In the field of rubber science and technology the digital revolution is under way and integrates technologies across the information technologies coupled with advances in characterization and experiment of materials. In this situation, accelerating the integration will be crucial to achieving competitiveness. A good simulation structural model should capture the actual structure at the moment as a function of time and space. But it is currently difficult to visualize the real motion of a rubber chain and its cross-linked network experimentally. Hence, a mathematical model based on fundamental physical principles such as thermodynamics is more desirable than a model based on virtual simulations. But no one has yet successfully derived such a model for rubber from the physical principles governing the molecular response of rubbers. The present work shows a nano-mechanical model of rubbery materials for computational simulation, which is based on the non-equilibrium thermodynamics.
Hence, a constitutive equation, which can cover the stress-strain behaviours up to higher strain region as a function of temperature, has been investigated. Since the stress-strain behaviour shows a transition to the glass-hard state at lower temperature, where the contribution of the internal energy is increased, a constitutive equation was derived from the statistical thermodynamics with Hamiltonian equations considering the change in internal energy.
