A New Approach for Mixed‐Mode Fracture Assessment of Rubber‐Like Materials With Cracks

ABSTRACT The use of rubbers in various industries has led researchers to investigate their behavior under different conditions. One of the most common and complicated conditions is the presence of cracks in rubbery samples. The presence of cracks adds to the complexity of the mechanical behavior of these nonlinear elastic materials. To date, several criteria have been proposed for the rupture analysis of rubber components containing cracks. However, for the first time in the present research, the theory of critical distances (TCD), combined with a stress‐based criterion, is extended to cracked hyperelastic materials subjected to pure mode I and mixed‐mode I/II loading conditions. To do so, by applying some changes based on the concept of the point method (PM) (PM‐TCD), a novel procedure for determining the parameters of this criterion in rubbers is proposed. To verify the accuracy of the criterion proposed under pure mode I and mixed‐mode I/II loading conditions in rubber‐like materials, several sets of experimental data available in the literature are evaluated, and the corresponding predictions form the suggested criterion are obtained. Comparing the experimental data with theoretical predictions under the mentioned loading conditions in different rubbers demonstrates that the suggested criterion is not only simple but also very accurate.