ABSTRACT
Most of these phenomena depend on temperature and have distinguishable thermal and calorimetric signatures. This is the reason why a thermomechanical analysis of rubber deformation should improve our knowledge of the mechanisms involved in rubber deformation, including entropic elasticity, reinforcement by fillers, strain-induced crystallization and stress softening. Among the possibilities available to measure temperature variations during material deformation, infrared thermography appears to be a more and more interesting approach. This technique has been widely applied to metals, polymers and composite materials (see for instance (Chrysochoos & Louche 2001) and (Berthel et al. 2007)), but rarely to elastomeric materials (Trabelsi et al. 2003; Pottier et al. 2009; Toussaint et al. 2012; Samaca Martinez et al. 2013a, 2013b). This is mainly due to difficulties in extending the measurement to the large deformations undergone by rubber (Le Cam et al. 2015).
