Finite Element Modeling and Simulation of Rubber Based Products: Application to Solid Resilient Tire

This paper explores the procedure of selecting the best-fitted hyper-elastic material model to describe the mechanical behavior of filled vulcanized rubber-based products, by using nonlinear 3D numerical simulation. Constitutive relationships of these hyper-elastic material models are represented by the strain-energy density functions with the form of polynomial equations. These models utilize to capture the non-linear elasticity and incompressible behavior of elastomers, such as rubber-like materials. In this study, the curve fitting approach and three statistical indexes (MAPE, MAD, and MSD) are proposed to find the best fit hyper-elastic material model and coefficients for a given set of test data of a filled vulcanized rubber sample. Moreover, it highlights the contradictories of each material model by considering the available test data. A three-layered solid resilient tire is used as the numerical example for this study. In this numerical study, the minimum values of the three statistical indexes and coefficients which are obtained from the best-fitted material model with the given experimental data are conformed. The results show that the Yeoh model has a good agreement with the stress-strain curve, which obtained from the experimental data. Further, a static analysis is conducted on the target industrial solid tire, by introducing the selected material model and reasonable displacement and stress results are obtained.