Estimating strain energy release rate during blade abrasion using virtual crack closure technique

摘要

The abrasion behaviour of rubber is the principal life determining property for a wide range of different rubber engineering applications such as tyres. Researchers have devoted a lot of effort to understanding these various abrasion mechanisms. Blade abrasion testing was developed to allow a fracture mechanics approach to be used to analyse abrasion. One of the main challenges for blade abrasion study has been to accurately determine the strain energy release rate (SERR). An approximate equation was proposed many years ago, which gave good correlations with the pure shear fatigue test for some rubber compound such as unfilled SBR. Later, the SERR was calculated using finite element analysis (FEA), using for example, an energy balance approach. This FEA technique gave an even better correlation between predicted and measured abrasion. In this paper, blade abrasion testing is modelled using FEA this time adopting a virtual crack closure technique (VCCT) to estimate SERR during abrasion. Instead of running two simulations, the VCCT can calculate the SERR from one simulation. VCCT is a much simpler, more reliable, faster approach than other methods such as energy balance approach.