On the effect of temperature gradient on the stability of circular tubes made of hyperelastic entropic material

Rubber-like materials are very applicable in almost all fields of industries, but due to their large deformation characteristic, they can exhibit a variety of instabilities. Accordingly, many researchers have been motivated to investigate the effects of different parameters on the stability of hyperelastic cylindrical tubes under finite deformation, while the effects of temperature gradient have not been considered. In this paper, the effects of temperature variation on the stability and thermo-mechanical behavior of the cylindrical tubes made of the entropic materials such as rubber-like materials and elastomers are investigated via an effective strain energy density function. To this purpose, an Ogden-type strain energy density with only integer powers is applied in order to determine an analytical solution, not involving the integral form, for the stress distribution through the wall thickness of cylindrical tubes at finite deformation thermoelasticity. This problem is examined in two cases including (i) a thick-walled cylindrical tube under internal pressure and uniform variation of temperature and (ii) a thick-walled cylindrical tube under internal pressure and temperature gradient, simultaneously. It was observed that the positive temperature gradients in comparison with environment temperatures improve the stability of the circular tubes made of the entropic materials.