THE MECHANICAL BEHAVIOR OF A SLIGHTLY COMPRESSIBLE RUBBER-LIKE MATERIAL: CORRELATION OF SIMULATIONS AND EXPERIMENTS

The purpose of this paper is to present a different approach tor modeling the mechanical behavior of a compressible rubber-like material. In this approach, the motion of the body is described in the current configuration in convected material frames and the Cauchy stress tensor and Almansi strain tensor are used. The hyperelaslic constitutive law, corresponding to this approach, is also presented. Non-homogeneous experiments on compact chloroprene specimens were carried out, in order to show the possibilities of the model. The material parameters are identified using an inverse problem approach, based on the minimization of the gap between the experimental load-displacement curve and the simulated one and on a numerical calculation of the cost function gradient. Results show that over a set of three different non-homogeneous and multiaxial tests, there is a good correlation between experiments and simulation.