ABSTRACT
Rubber-like materials are usually considered as incompressible. However, under multiaxial or fatigue loading conditions, cavitation and cavities growth take place, and lead to damage and finally to fracture (Farris 1968; Le Cam et al. 2004; Le Gorju 2007). Special experiments can be carried out to exhibit this behaviour as proposed by Gent and Thomas (1958), Gent and Wang (1991) or Legorju-Jago and Bathias (2002). For modelling, on the one hand the cavitation phenomenon under hydrostatic loading conditions is studied considering the stability conditions for the sudden growth of microscopic cavities in the incompressible bulk (see Ball (1982), Horgan and Abeyaratne (1986) for example). On the other hand, several phenomenological approaches have been proposed to predict the growth of pre-existing cavities; the corresponding models incorporate damage variables into compressible hyperelastic approaches (see Boyce and Arruda (2000) for a short review) to quantify the irreversible change of porosity (Andrieux et al. 1997; Dorfmann et al. 2002; Layouni et al. 2003; Li et al. 2007). These models can also be extended to cavitation by adapting the rate equation of the damage variable (Dorfmann 2003). Nevertheless, they are limited to small values of the porosity.
