A constitutive model for compressible elastomeric solids

A non-linear thermo-elastic constitutive model for the large deformations of isotropic materials is formulated. This model is specialized to account for the physics and thermodynamics of the elastic deformation of rubber-like materials, and based on these molecular considerations a constitutive model for compressible elastomeric solids is proposed. The new constitutive model generalizes the incompressible and isothermal model of Arruda and Boyce (1993) to include the compressibility and thermal expansion of these materials. The model is fit to existing experimental data on vulcanized natural rubbers to determine the material parameters for the rubbers examined. The fit between the simple model and the data is found to be very good for large stretches and moderate volume changes.