Physical and mechanical properties of vulcanized and filled rubber at high strain rate

The purpose of this study is to investigate -at nanoscale- cis-Polyisoprene(cis-PI), the main component of natural rubber. This system is vulcanized by adding elemental sulfur to cis-PI and vulcanizing at high temperature to obtain vulcanized rubber. The study is extended to cis-PI including different amounts of fullerenes to the vulcanized rubber at high temperature in order to obtain carbon black filled vulcanized rubber. The physical and thermodynamic properties of vulcanized rubber as well as carbon black-filled vulcanized rubber were studied to shed light on the effects of vulcanization and nanofiller on natural rubber. The interaction between fullerenes and cis-PI atoms and the aggregation configuration of cis-PI atoms around fullerenes were analyzed in details by introducing local number density and potential mean force (PMF) through radial distribution function (RDF). Besides, various mechanical quantities were obtained at different temperatures with and without nanofiller.