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for Cavitation in rubber: An elastic instability or a fracture phenomenon?

=Oscar Lopez-Pamies, Ph.D.=
===December , 2012===

Cavitation in rubber: An elastic instability or a fracture phenomenon?

can induce the sudden appearance of internal cavities within elastomeric (and other
soft) solids. The occurrence of such a phenomenon, commonly referred to as cavitation,
can be attributed to the growth of pre-existing defects into finite sizes.
In the first part of this talk, I will present a new theory within the context of nonlinear
elasticity to study the phenomenon of cavitation in rubber that contrary to previous
approaches: (i) allows to consider general 3D loading conditions with arbitrary
triaxiality, (ii) applies to general classes of nonlinear elastic solids, and (iii) incorporates
direct information on the initial shape, spatial distribution, and mechanical properties of
the underlying defects at which cavitation can initiate. The basic idea is to first cast
cavitation in elastomeric solids as the homogenization problem of nonlinear elastic
materials containing random distributions of zero-volume cavities, or defects. Then, by
means of a novel iterated homogenization procedure, exact solutions are constructed
for such a problem. These include solutions for the change in size of the underlying
cavities as a function of the applied loading conditions, from which the onset of
cavitation — corresponding to the event when the initially infinitesimal cavities
suddenly grow into finite sizes — can be readily determined.
In the second part of the talk, I will confront the theory with a variety of cavitation
experiments with the objective of establishing whether the phenomenon of cavitation is
an elastic instability (and hence depends only on the elastic properties of the rubber),
or, on the other hand, a fracture process (and hence depends on the fracture properties
of the rubber).

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