Numerical prediction and experiment on rubber creep and stress relaxation using time-dependent hyperelastic approach

Rubber is an excellent material for anti-vibration components in industry with a long term service. However, its time-dependent behaviour is undesirable in engineering applications. This article presents an engineering approach to evaluate the time-dependent responses, i.e., creep and stress relaxation, for rubber anti-vibration components. A time-dependent damage function was introduced into hyperelastic models. This function can be expressed in three forms. A typical rubber product and a dumbbell specimen were selected to validate the proposed approach. It has been shown that the predictions obtained from this method are consistent with the experimental data. It has also been established that the time-dependent response of industrial products can be predicted based on the responses from simple specimens, e.g., dumbbell specimen. In addition, it is possible to obtain a creep response based on a relaxation response and vice versa (by changing K value only) using the proposed approach, which has also been observed experimentally in the literature. The proposed function can also be easily incorporated into commercial finite element software (e.g., Abaqus). It has been demonstrated that the proposed method may be used at an appropriate design stage. Finally, the readers can select one of the three forms presented to perform assessments on the time-dependent responses evaluations for rubber anti-vibration products.