Study Of Fatigue Behavior Of Rubber Like Materials With Infrared Thermography Methods

The rubber-like materials are widely used in the industry, aeronautic or automotive. In those applications, the fatigue damage must be taken into account, which requires very long and costly campaigns. One of the main goals of the research on this kind of materials is to improve the prediction of fatigue life with shorter and cheaper tests. This presentation describes the first part of an ongoing thesis about the study of the fatigue behavior of the polychloroprene. It's dealing with the definition of a thermal parameter and verifying if it can be used as a fatigue life criterion. This parameter would be measured within the firsts thousands cycles of the fatigue test and could predict with a very good precision the stabilized surface temperature and the hysteresis area. The relationship with an energetic criterion is interesting because it shows the existence of a link between the temperature evolution (which is a non-intrinsic parameter) and a parameter which can lead to the dissipated energy density. It is also observed that for a same load ratio, monitoring the heating speed for several maximal loads shows a three parts curve standing for three different behaviors against fatigue damage. Eventually, the strain-induced crystallization can be observed with thermal measures, getting very close results with the literature.