ABSTRACT
Rubbers are elastomeric nanocomposites that have long been used in industry and are of great practical importance. The incorporation of active fillers in rubber compounds increases by an order of magnitude the strength of the material compared to the unfilled elastomer and increases breaking deformations (Kraus, 1971). These materials have a number of features essential for the understanding of their behavior. In particular, near filler particles there appear polymer layers with special characteristics. During the failure of rubber compounds, at the tip of a macrorupture there occur fibers joining the edges of this macrorupture (Le Cam et al., 2004), where the polymer chains are in the oriented state (Trabelsi et al., 2003). The formation and disappearance of the oriented regions explain the hysteresis phenomena in the material subject to cyclic loading (Toki et al. 2003; Toki et al. 2004). On this basis, we put forward the following hypothesis: during deformation, between the aggregates of filler particles there appear uniaxially oriented fibers caused by the slippage of polymers chains from the layers near the active filler into the gaps between particles. In the present paper, we offer the structural-phenomenological model able to accurately describe the mechanical behavior of the medium taking into account the process of fiber formation at the nano-level of the material.
