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arXiv · 2303.05340

The trousers fracture test for viscoelastic elastomers

Bhavesh Shrimali·Oscar Lopez-Pamies
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Abstract

Shrimali and Lopez-Pamies (2023) have recently shown that the Griffith criticality condition that governs crack growth in viscoelastic elastomers can be reduced to a fundamental form that involves exclusively the intrinsic fracture energy $G_c$ of the elastomer and, in so doing, they have brought resolution to the complete description of the historically elusive notion of critical tearing energy $T_c$. The purpose of this paper -- which can be viewed as the third installment of the series started by Shrimali and Lopez-Pamies (2023) -- is to make use of this fundamental form to explain one of the most popular fracture tests for probing the growth of cracks in viscoelastic elastomers, the trousers test.

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Bhavesh Shrimali, Oscar Lopez-Pamies. 2023-03-09. The trousers fracture test for viscoelastic elastomers. https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4062140

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