ABSTRACT
One of the major uses of elastomeric parts for industrial applications is anti-vibration systems. If the design of static or dynamic requirements could appear well mastered, the field experience underlines that the two main failure mechanisms are related to fatigue and ageing. In this paper, the focus is given on fatigue. For a dozen years, coupled studies of industrials and academic partners allowed to propose several phenomenological criteria to evaluate the fatigue lifetime of elastomeric structures (Mars & Fatemi 2002). Nevertheless, the design of parts against fatigue remains difficult because of the very strong coupling of the failure to the microstructure features. This comes from the heterogeneous nature of these materials, for a very wide range of matrix and fillers, and from the first order influence of the process, including mixing, injection and curing steps. From an industrial point of view, the development of materials resistant to fatigue is therefore very complex because the variable parameters are incredibly numerous, the fatigue tests are long and requires many samples, and at the same time, the time left to develop new parts or adapt to environment requirements
Le Saux et al. 2011) and the energy or the local mechanical fields needed to initiate a void are of course dependant on the materials chosen for the matrix and the fillers.
