Deformation Behavior of Spherical Gel under Quasi-static Compressive Loading Condition

Abstract

Elastomeric gels are soft--elastic materials consisting of a three-dimensional crosslinked polymer network and liquid filling the space among such network. To take advantage of the swelling-deformation behavior of elastomeric gel and explore its possibility for applications in engineering as a structural member, the construction of its mechanical model is indispensable. Therefore, in this study, we at first proposed a nonaffine model for the elastomeric gel to account for the change of the entangling structure of polymer chains during the swelling-deformation process, in which the change of the number of polymer chains per unit volume N is depending on the first invariant of right Cauchy-Green tensor I₁. And then, to investigate the effect of the nonaffine movement of the polymer chain on the mechanical behavior of the elastomeric gel, we performed a FEM simulation for a spherical gel under quasi-static compressive loading condition. The results show that the nonaffine movement of the polymer chain may leads to the decrease of the deformation resistance of the elastomeric gel, whereas it has no effect on its swelling ratio.