Micro‐mechanical study of interactions between polymers and filler aggregates

Abstract

Filled rubber-like materials exhibit a complex, history-dependent hysteretic behavior which is mostly due to damage of microstructures inside the rubber matrix. In this paper, we study the contribution of filler aggregates inside the elastomer to this damage behavior. To this end, a recently proposed multi-scale model of single aggregates [1] is applied. The network decomposition concept adopted there is further extended here to an additional network [1] which takes into account elasticity of filler aggregates and polymer chains in their vicinity. This network is described by means of a 3D statistical volume element (SVE) obtained by homogenization over the aggregate size distribution within the rubber matrix.