ABSTRACT
The fatigue failure process for rubber materials is generally divided into the crack nucleation and crack propagation parts, cf. Mars & Fatemi (2002). As a consequence of this, the different approaches used to predict the fatigue life of rubber components are also divided between those who consider the nucleation, Wang et al. (2002), Luo & Wu (2006), Kim et al. (2004) and Saintier et al. (2006)
1 INTRODUCTION
Rubber components are used extensively in, e.g., the automotive industry for vibration absorbtion whereby they are subjected to cyclic mechanical loading that can lead to fatigue failure. Therefore, it is vital that the fatigue life of the component can be estimated a-priori based on the knowledge of its service condition. Due to heat generation and the sensitivity of rubber material to increased temperature, fatigue evaluation of rubber components with testing must be undertaken at very low frequencies, often around 1 Hz. This makes fatigue testing of rubber time consuming and expensive which motivates the use of modelling and simulations to estimate the fatigue life.
