Abstract
To conduct material characterization of soft material that exhibits large deformation against external load, simple tensile, pure shear and equibiaxial tensile tests are considered necessary to conduct. In this study, a novel method to conduct equibiaxial tensile tests using combinations of a universal testing machine and a special fixture was proposed. Simple tensile, pure shear and equibiaxial tensile tests of a silicone rubber were conducted, and stress-strain curves obtained from the tests were then used to identify the parameters of hyperelastic Ogden model of the silicone rubber. Validation was performed by simulating the three tests using hyperelastic Ogden model in a commercial finite element analysis software with the identified parameters. Simulation results were in good agreement with the test results, indicates that the test and the identified parameters were valid. Comparisons to the results of simulations using parameters identified only by simple tensile test result show that it is important to use results of the three different tests in order to obtain better simulation results.
