The Modeling Of Meso-scale Structures Of Rubber Material And Its Application In Tire Tread

Rubber material is widely used in the modern society and it can be found everywhere in vehicle as well.Lots of components and parts of the vehicle consist of rubber such as tires,shock pads,seal rings,various kinds of pipes and so on.The weight of the rubber components in vehicle occupies about 3.5%-8% of the whole vehicle's weight.Rubber material is the second-largest material in the vehicle and the steel is the first majority material in car.The rubber product that we used in modern society is mainly made from vulcanized rubber.In order to satisfy the different properties which different rubber products need,vulcanized rubber also needs to add various rubber chemicals such as filler,fortifier,adhesive and so on.Different content and different kinds of the rubber chemicals can make great influence on the vulcanized rubber's properties.Carbon black,one of the fortifiers,can improve the physical properties such as tear strength and wear-resisting property of rubber significantly.It has a great effect on the mechanical properties of rubber.So we discuss the modeling of meso-scale structures of rubber material to obtain the missing mechanical properties resulting from the carbon black in the classic rubber model in this paper.The main content includes the following aspects:First of all,the experiment table were used to finish the uniaxial tensile test to measure the rubber's hyperelastic characteristic.Then we made use of the finite element analysis software called ABAQUS to fit the experiment data and choose the most accurate model to be the rubber material's hyperelasic model from the fitting results.From the hyperelastic model that we choose,the fitting parameters of the model can be obtained.And DMA test has been done.The material's dynamic mechanical behavior was tested and the result was fitted.Next,in order to obtain the TEM image,the rubber material was sliced and the TEM was used to scan the slices.And then we made the processing and analysis on the TEM image.As a result,we acquired the size of the carbon black particle and the aggregates of the carbon black particles.The modeling of meso-scale structures of rubber material finished when we defined the size and boundary conditions of the RVE.Last but not least,the RVE model filled with carbon black was exported to the ABAQUS and the stress-strain curve of the uniaxial tensile of the meso-scale model can be obtained by the simulation.The results of the simulation were compared with the experiment data.As it turned out,the meso-scale model of the rubber material can predict the rubber's mechanical property accurately within a certain strain range.