ABSTRACT
Elastomeric materials embrace natural and synthetic rubber as well as biological tissues. Attention in this chapter is restricted to isotropic elastomers. Their characteristic is that deformation is recoverable even up to very large strains, and the stress is a nonlinear function of strain. Accordingly, they pose issues of material and geometric nonlinearity, potentially also of boundary condition nonlinearity. They pose two additional issues not addressed in Chapter 15. One is the presence of thermal fields coupled (weakly) to the mechanical field, and the second is the presence of a pressure field arising to enforce the constraint of incompressibility or near-incompressibility and serving as an additional primary variable.
