CONFIGURATIONAL MECHANICS: A TOOL TO INVESTIGATEFRACTURE AND FATIGUE OF RUBBER

摘要

Our objective is twofold: (1) to offer a short state of the art on the framework of configurational mechanics to rubber researchers and engineers, and (2) to show that it is well adapted to rubber mechanics. The state of the art presents the general theory but also highlights the physical meaning of the Eshelby stress tensor and of its path integrals; then, we propose a list of recent applications involving configurational mechanics. Attention is then focused on rubber applications: recent work on the simulation of fracture in inelastic materials and on the development of predictors for fatigue crack initiation is presented.