The rubber, the main material of power transmission belts, contains short fibers for reinforcement, and its mechanical behavior changes depending on the amount and distribution of the fibers. If both the short fibers and the base rubber were modeled as solid elements to predict this with FEM analysis, the total number of elements would become enormous, increasing the calculation costs. Therefore, the short fibers were modeled as a series of truss elements, and an element for embedding the short fibers in the base rubber of the solid elements was developed and implemented in FrontISTR, an open-source software, significantly reducing the total number of elements. This makes it possible to quickly analyze short fiber-mixed rubber with fewer calculation resources.
