The Technology
Soft materials such as rubbers, elastomeric composites, hydrogels, and shape-memory polymers are integral to modern engineering, powering applications across automotive, aerospace, electronics, and biomedical industries. Yet despite their versatility, conventional testing and modeling methods often fail to capture their complex thermo-mechanical and failure behaviors, leading to costly design errors and reliability issues. The field faces persistent challenges: temperature variations between 20 °C and 90 °C are rarely considered in deformation and failure modeling; most constitutive models are calibrated solely on uniaxial tension tests, which do not accurately predict multiaxial loading behavior; failure mechanisms are typically excluded from constitutive descriptions; direct biaxial tests remain highly sensitive to imperfections and boundary effects; and studies on cavitation instability—where voids expand under hydrostatic tension—tend to neglect the role of material failure, making experiments both difficult and expensive.
A comprehensive experimental and theoretical platform for accurately predicting the deformation and failure of advanced soft materials under realistic, multiaxial stress and thermal conditions is introduced.
A robust bulge test method provides pure equibiaxial stress conditions and localized failure independent of boundary imperfections, while an inverse finite element (FEA) calibration extracts precise biaxial data from complex strain fields. Simultaneous calibration of parameters across uniaxial and biaxial tests ensures accuracy and generality, and the approach has been successfully implemented for rubbers, elastomeric composites, hydrogels, and shape-memory polymers—including temperature-dependent models that unify rubbery and glassy phase behavior.
Advantages
- Superior Predictive Power: Models accurately capture both uniaxial and biaxial behaviors, ensuring reliability under real loading conditions.
- Comprehensive Failure Insight: Enables simulation of cavitation and temperature-dependent fracture phenomena.
- Temperature Sensitivity Mapping: Visualizes how strength and stiffness evolve across temperatures via biaxial failure envelopes.
- Unified Modeling for SMPs: Describes both shape-memory and failure behavior within one consistent framework.
- Design Optimization: Provides engineers with actionable insights to refine formulations and geometries for performance and durability.
Applications
- Improves soft materials design
- Identifying optimal blend ratios
- Reveals failure from cavity growth
- Measuring performance under cyclic thermal and multiaxial loading.
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