A new constitutive model for the compressibility of elastomers at finite deformations

Although traditional constitutive models for rubbery elastic materials are incompressible, many materials that demonstrate nonlinear elastic behavior are somewhat compressible. Clearly important in hydrostatic deformations, compressibility can also significantly affect the response of elastomers in applications for which several boundaries are rigidly fixed, such as bushings, or triaxial states of stress are realized. Compressibility is also important for convergence of finite element simulations in which a rubbery elastic constitutive law is in use. Volume changes that reflect compressibility have been observed historically in both uniaxial tension and hydrostatic compression tests; however, there appear to be no data obtained from both types of tests on the same material by which to validate a compressible hyperelastic law. In this paper, we propose a new compressible hyperelastic constitutive law for elastomers and other rubbery materials in which entropy and internal energy changes contribute to the volume change. Using data from the literature, we show that this law is capable of reproducing both the pressure-volume response of elastomers in hydrostatic compression, as well as the stress-stretch and volume change-stretch data of elastomers in uniaxial tension.