Improving the functional life of rubber materials
One of the key industrial processes of manufacturing rubber components is mould-filling whose efficiency improvement is directly related to many advantages. Such advantages may include waste, time and energy reduction as well as elimination of tooling costs. Until now, the rubber industry has been reluctant in adopting mould-filling simulation because of its limited predictive power and high requirements on measuring of material properties. Employing commercial codes for simulation of rubbers processing, a newly developed methodology offers a valuable tool for designing or improving relevant manufacturing processes. The new tool may overcome the shortcomings of other simulation methods since poor predictions have been now limited and the number of material-parameter measurements have been minimised. Additional models such as a stress relaxation model for predicting fatigue life have also been added and all models have been validated against experimental data. Moreover, rubber materials have been characterised in terms of mechanical properties such as elasticity, softening/recovery and fatigue performance. On this basis suitable predictive models for elastomers have been developed taking into account functional aspects like temperature, ageing and strain rate. In addition, fatigue testing of various materials revealed important information on material response to processing and thermal effects. This integrated analysis and testing offers useful information that allows the reliable and accurate determination of component life. The developed tools and know-how from this project are expected to contribute to the improvement of manufacturing processes within the rubber-component and polymer-processing industries. These suppliers provide materials for many end-user industries within a broad-range of fields including automotive, offshore, mining and biomechanical engineering. Therefore, the benefits gained can affect both suppliers and end-users offering the European industries the competitive edge within the international market arena.
