Filled elastomers sliding over smooth obstacles: Experiments and modeling in large deformations

The objective of this paper is to shed light on the mechanical response of filled elastomers in sliding contact. Compared to situations encountered by tires in breaking conditions, the study only considers smooth obstacles in order to analyze the contribution of finite deformations and of the complex viscosity of filled elastomers without facing all the complexity of surface roughness. For this purpose, a new experiment is introduced that allows to measure the friction on the surface of a filled elastomer that is subjected to large local deformation through a cyclic contact loading applied by sliding indenters. The setup uses smooth spherical indenters sliding on the material of interest within a temperature controlled water tank. The relevance of adhesion forces is reduced by using Teflon as a dry lubricant and Sinnozon as a surfactant. To analyze the experimental results, full-field simulations of the experiments are carried out within the setting of finite viscoelastodynamics by making use of two types of viscoelastic constitutive models for the filled elastomer: ($i$) a classical viscoelastic model combining a Mooney–Rivlin equilibrium elasticity and Maxwell branches with constant viscosities and ($ii$) an internal-variable-based viscoelastic model that was introduced in Kumar and Lopez-Pamies (2016) for unfilled elastomers and that is extended herein to account for the more complex viscous response of filled elastomers.