ABSTRACT
Carbon Black-filled Natural Rubber (CB-NR) exhibits longer fatigue life than other elastomeric materials (Beatty 1964). Number of mechanical studies have been proposed to quantify the longterm durability of this material (see Lake (1995, Mars and Fatemi (2002) and the references herein). Nevertheless, only few recent papers investigate the microstructural aspects of fatigue crack growth in rubber (Le Cam et al. 2004; Hainsworth 2007); in these studies, fatigue tests are first conducted until a sufficiently long fatigue crack develops in the sample, then this sample is stretched and the open crack is observed in a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). Moreover, Le Cam et al. develop an original “microcutting” technique which permits to observe fatigue damage behind the crack tip and then to propose a scenario of fatigue crack growth in NR (Le Cam et al. 2004).
