An attempt to predict the heat build-up of filled elastomers under multiaxial fatigue

Elastomeric materials are well-known for their ability to dissipate mechanical energy into heat. Under cyclic loading, this dissipated energy, combined with the low thermal conductivity of these materials causes heat storage in the sample resulting in a rise of the material temperature. As this phenomenon induces negative effects on fatigue life, this heat build-up has been widely studied in recent years but a few for multiaxial loadings. In this paper, we propose to investigate the self-heating induced by multiaxial mechanical loading of Natural Rubber (NR). The goal of this research work is to find a suitable modeling to predict the heat build-up of elastomers under multiaxial cyclic loadings. The proposed model, based upon a weak coupling approach and which only requires an estimation of the energy dissipation during a cycle of loading, is used to predict the heat build-up evolution of 3 different specimen geometries under multiaxial cyclic mechanical loading for 2 materials: a natural rubber (NR) experimentally investigated in this work allowing to develop the model and a styrenebutadiene rubber (SBR) which heat build-up data are taken from the literature for further model validation. A satisfactory agreement between simulations and experiments is found, making this approach a useful tool for temperature evolution estimates during fatigue loading.