Focus on future trends in experimental determination of crack initiation in reinforced rubber

Abstract

We concentrate our work to the description of the state-of the-art and future trends in experimental laboratory characterization concerning structure-property relationship of unfilled and filler reinforced elastomers with respect to the micro-crack's initiation and its propagation under the behavior simulating the real loading conditions in practice. We theoretically describe the fracture mechanism leading to the micro-crack initiation and summarize the criterions, which are available for experimental characterization of rubber fracture. We describe how the micro-crack initiation could experimentally be analysed with common testing equipment. Finally we show how the experimental fracture analysis and surface investigation could contribute to a description of the interaction between micro-cracks initiation, fatigue and fracture crack propagation in rubber under the real dynamic loading conditions.