Evaluation of fatigue performance of filled and unfilled natural rubber/styrene-butadiene rubber composites

This paper deals with the fatigue life analysis of a blend of natural rubber (NR) and styrene-butadiene rubber (SBR) with and without nanoclay particles. Various damage parameters based on strain are investigated. A nonlinear finite element analysis is carried out by using ABAQUS. To formulate the life prediction models, the measured fatigue life is used together with various damage parameters. It is shown that all the damage parameters can estimate the fatigue lives effectively with correlation coefficients greater than 0.9. There is a good agreement between the obtained fatigue live predictions and the measured fatigue results. The effect of various parameters such as true strain and nanoparticles' loading is also investigated. The results of sensitivity analysis show that the strain has a greater effect on the variation of the rubber compounds' fatigue life. The test samples' fracture surface is assessed via scanning electron microscopy (SEM). SEM results show that as the strain increases, the test samples softly fail while the fracture surface of the nanocomposite is roughened by the addition of nanoclay.