Open Access

Christian Ziegler, Herbert Baaser, O. Häusler

• In this paper a practical way for fatigue life prediction of rubber products under multiaxial loads is shown. This is done by means of fracture mechanical concepts and the energy release rate as the failure criterion. Due to a FEA post-processor the potential energy release rate might be calculated at every material point supposed there was a crack. And therefore the risk of failure and with theIn this paper a practical way for fatigue life prediction of rubber products under multiaxial loads is shown. This is done by means of fracture mechanical concepts and the energy release rate as the failure criterion. Due to a FEA post-processor the potential energy release rate might be calculated at every material point supposed there was a crack. And therefore the risk of failure and with the help of a strain number curve the time to fatigue is able to be calculated by FEA. This concept is applied for an estimation of the life time of a test specimen with tensile loading from fatigue data of a shear loaded specimen of different design. This rather more theoretical concept of the energy release rate is complemented by experimental crack growth data by a Tear Fatigue Analyzer with its great advantage of reduction of testing time and costs compared to those of fatigue tests. For some materials a thorough characterization of crack growth and fatigue behavior is presented and is applied to estimate the time to fatigue by FEA for a real component under multiaxial loads.…