2022 Volume 95 Issue 9 Pages 281-288
In engineering uses of polymeric materials, heterogeneous polymer systems are applied to various parts or products as polymer blends and composites. Several useful topics on fundamental materials technology for the heterogeneous polymer systems will be introduced in the series of this special lecture, concerned with R&D activities in materials development & processing, product manufacturing & use, product retirement (end of life) and materials recycling. In this partⅠ, static fatigue of rubbery polymers under constant stress or strain conditions is mainly focused to obtain a basic understanding of the failure mechanism for pure and carbon black-filled rubber vulcanizates on the basis of a phenomenological theory of a stochastic process. The scattering in the lifetime of the pure vulcanizate reflects the inherent characteristics of the polymer, showing a random failure. Furthermore, influences of rubber-filler interactions, crosslink density and size of hard domains dispersed in the rubber matrix on the failure mechanism are discussed how to interrupt an unstable failure for the pure rubber vulcanizate.
