Deformation of Molecular Chain's Network Structure 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, investigations on the swelling-deformation behavior under various loading conditions are 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 deformation 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 swelling-deformation behavior of the spherical gel is quite different at the positions such as the polar, the equator or the center of the sphere.