Experimental investigation of the Mullins effect in swollen elastomers

Mullins effect greatly attracts the attention of many researchers in the twentieth century after it was successfully reported for the very first time of rubber vulcanizated by Bouasse and Carrière (1903). However, the corresponding stress-softening isreferred to the Mullins effect after Mullins (1948). The Mullins effect is an important inelastic behavior which is said to appear in a stress-strain response when a lower consecutive stress is needed to achieve the same amount of stretch generated from the first loading (Diani et al. 2009).