Tearing of vulcanized rubber

摘要

This short review summarizes some results of studies of rubber fracture carried out in the author's laboratory over the past several years. Particular attention has been focused on the details of cracking in technically important natural rubber vulcanizates with very high resistance to tearing. Such rubbers develop auxiliary cracks that grow essentially parallel to the loading direction and inhibit the main tear front from advancing. This crack splitting is attributed to oriented structure at the tear front and is predicted to occur when strength anisotropy at a tear tip reaches a critical value.